My talk will discuss how R, the Tidyverse, and the community around R helped me to learn to code and create my first R package. My positive experiences with the resources for learning R and the community itself led me to create a blog detailing my experiences with R as a way to pass along the knowledge that I gained. The next step was to develop my first package. The debkeepr package integrates non-decimal monetary systems of pounds, shillings, and pence into R, making it possible to accurately analyze and visualize historical account books. It is my hope that debkeepr can help bring to light crucial and interesting social interactions that are buried in economic manuscripts, making these stories accessible to a wider audience.
I am a historian of early modern Europe and currently a lecturer at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles. My research investigates the significance of sibling relationships and inheritance in the development of early modern capitalism. I have been using R for approximately two and a half years to analyze and visualize historical data. I am the author of two R packages that should be on CRAN shortly. The opencage package geocodes locations and is written in concert with Maëlle Salmon and Daniel Possenriede, among others. I am also writing a package called debkeepr that integrates non-decimal currencies into R through the basis provided by the vctrs package.
