Automation, reproducibility, data driven. These are not normally concepts one would associate with the traditional publishing industry, where designers normally manually produce every artefact in proprietary software. And, when you have 1000s of figures to produce and update for a single textbook, this becomes an insurmountable task, meaning our textbooks quickly become outdated, especially in our rapidly advancing world.
With R and the tidyverse in our back pocket, we rose to the challenge to revolutionize this workflow. I will explain how we collaborated with a publishing group to develop a system to aesthetically automate the production of figures for a textbook including translations into several languages.
I think you’ll find this talk interesting as it shows how we applied tools that are familiar to us, but in an unconventional way to fundamentally transform a conventional process.
Megan Beckett is a Data Scientist at Exegetic Analytics, where she consults, develops and leads several analytical projects across a wide range of fields and industries. *"Scientifically creative; creatively scientific."* This aptly describes her philosophy and approach in her work and life. Megan helped co-found and organises the Cape Town R-Ladies chapter and is a co-organiser of the satRday events in South Africa. She loves to paint, with her most recent work exploring the [biodiversity of southern Africa](https://mappamundi.netlify.app/portfolio/), and running is her passion, whether on the road or the trail.
