Just a few days since the useR! 2008 conference, it is time for some initial evaluation of the reception of my presentation of Read.isi.

The presentation itself went well. I was presenting in one of the larger rooms of the conference, to an audience of about 50-60 people. I was rather content with that number, especially because I received some nice and supportive feedback. This feedback made rather clear, however, that I’m not a professional programmer (which I obviously already knew). Fortunately, the suggestions were focused on performance, rather than preventing errors.

I is always a nice topic to talk about with fellow conference attendants: are you presenting something? Quite some of the people who asked me that, appeared to have read my abstract. After my presentation, one person came to speak to me. He used to work with the Word Fertility Survey and said he would have loved my package to be available back then.

But most of all, the chair of the sessions I presented Read.isi in, also one of the members of the R core group, suggested to refer to my package from within the data manual of R-Project itself. To me, this is a level of endorsement I hadn’t expected and is a strong stimulus to keep improving my package.

All in all, I’m very happy with the way Read.isi was received.