The sprout named v0.8

Dr. Minh-Hoang Nguyen
Phenikaa University

January 4, 2026

In this first post of the new year 2026, it is perhaps relevant to mention our last joint publication of the year 2025, titled “What Makes Readers Love a Fiction Book”, published on December 30, in SAGE Open [1].

This article emerged from a joint attempt to analyze Amazon book reviews as a new analytical approach to content analysis. Clearly, we leverage the computing capability of BMF analytics, combined with some innovative capacity of GITT-VT.

BMF analytics has become familiar with us all, to the extent that we consider it our main workhorse. The analytical approach has been aided by a computing tool, also frequenting our manuscripts over the past years, i.e., the bayesvl R package.

So far, nothing new... and here’s the thing.

In May 2025, bayesvl was formally upgraded to version 1.0.0, adding new functions and utilities that have better served our computing and graphics needs. But what did it look like in its early days? What I could still remember about the early days of bayesvl led me to dig out the CRAN’s index as follows:



Figure: CRAN’s page on bayesvl version 0.8.0

The Figure shows the earliest version recorded on CRAN, dated May 13, 2019, named “bayesvl package for Bayesian statistical analyses in R”. Several other early manuscripts did use earlier versions, such as v0.6.1, v0.6.5, but the very first one mentioned by CRAN is v0.8.0.

Thus, it is quite plausible to call bayesvl v0.8.0 the sprout that augured for our full-fledged bayesvl 1.0 as we have seen it now.

References

[1] Nguyen MH, Sari NPWP, Duong MPT, Ho MT, Tran TMA, Li D, et al. (2025) What Makes Readers Love a Fiction Book: A Statistical Analysis on Wild Wise Weird Using Real-World Data From Amazon Readers’ Reviews. Sage Open, 15(4), 21582440251407823. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/21582440251407823

[2] Vuong QH, Nguyen MH, La VP (2022) The mindsponge and BMF analytics for innovative thinking in social sciences and humanities. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter. https://books.google.com/books/about/?id=EGeEEAAAQBAJ

[3] Vuong QH, La VP (2019) bayesvl package for Bayesian statistical analyses in R. http://books.google.com/books/about?id=uq2lEQAAQBAJ