Introduction to R for Social Scientists

Zar Room, John Crerar Library, University of Chicago

Apr 16-17, 2020

8:30am - 4:30pm

Instructors: Brooke Luetgert, William Ngiam

Helpers: Angela Li, Karina Acosta, Lachlan Deer

This workshop has been canceled due to the novel coronavirus. Campus facilities are closed and instructors are unavailable to teach. Please contact uccarpentries@gmail.com if you have any additional questions.

General Information

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners' existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing".

Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

Where: 5730 South Ellis Avenue, Chicago, Illinois. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

When: Apr 16-17, 2020. Add to your Google Calendar.

Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).

Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:

Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and large-print handouts are available if needed by notifying the organizers in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you (e.g. sign-language interpreters, lactation facilities) please get in touch (using contact details below) and we will attempt to provide them.

Contact: Please email uccarpentries@gmail.com or luetgert@uchicago.edu for more information.


Code of Conduct

Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct.This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.


Surveys

Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Post-workshop Survey


Schedule

Day 1

Before starting Pre-workshop survey
Morning Data Organization in Spreadsheets
AfternoonIntroduction to R
Evening END

Day 2

Morning Continuation of R: Data Analysis & Visualization
AfternoonIntroduction to RMarkdown
Evening Post-workshop survey
END

Syllabus


Setup

To participate in a Data Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.

The setup instructions for the Data Carpentry Social Sciences workshops (with R) can be found at the workshop overview site.

R

R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we use RStudio.

Video Tutorial

Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE. Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on .exe file and select "Run as administrator" instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.

You can download the binary files for your distribution from CRAN. Or you can use your package manager (e.g. for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base and for Fedora run sudo dnf install R). Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.