R Under Sirens
Research, Students, and Community in Wartime Ukraine
A national community - on a map I had to repair
93 Ukrainian R users answered from 12 oblasts.
This is Kyiv-heavy, and not a census.
To show Ukraine correctly, I first had to write code to put Crimea back on the map.
More than half were displaced - and most came back
Students, academics, and industry - often at once
What they build with R
A young, growing, intermediate community
How long they have used R
Self-rated level (1 = beginner, 5 = expert)
Sleepless nights, safer roads
Do night-time air-raid alerts change next-day road safety?
In R: ~2,000 geolocated Lviv accidents (2022-2024), linked to alert timing.
The counter-intuitive result: nights with alerts are followed by fewer accidents the next day.
Mapping de-russification, hromada by hromada
What does de-russification look like on the ground?
I prepared the data; R maps it: the share of streets with Russian-associated names, hromada by hromada, falling over time as communities rename them.
sf + a time axis + animation - a slow civic process you can watch move.
Preparing a lecture in a metro shelter
A real lecture being written - in RStudio, in Quarto - on a metro platform during a night-time missile attack.
I teach Social Statistics (undergraduate, close to data science) and Statistics and Econometrics 1.1.
The materials still shipped on time.
When the alert sounds, class moves underground
Behind this blast door are underground classrooms.
When an air-raid alert sounds during a lecture, this is where the class continues.
R does not care which room it runs in.
“Did the war affect your ability to work in R?”
…but look at what actually gets in the way
Even though 63% said the war affected them “not at all”:
The disruption is routine, not rare
And yet - most kept coding, or coded more
