1 Workshop Introduction

This short 3-day course in R aims to give you a basic framework and skills for working effectively with your research mentors. Together, we will get oriented with basic skills (e.g. using RStudio, documenting your process with R Markdown, reading data in, basic data analysis, and visualization) and concepts for how to organize your research workflows in R. We intend for this starting point to empower you to accomplish research-related tasks in R.

R is a high-level data analysis scripting language 1. While it is very easy to write programs in this language, it is designed first as an environment that stitches together cutting edge research methods with flexible visualization and reporting frameworks. R has swept to be the de facto high-level language for data analysis because of the rich ecosystem of dispersed open-source developers.

Here’s some examples of plots you generate in R. Here’s an example of the types of workflows and analyses you can generate in R (all the plots, and the website too). Heck, this website is generated by the R package bookdown from Rmd files, which you will learn to write.

  1. and also a “GNU” project, apparently!↩

Licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0

Website typeset with bookdown