R for Reproducible Scientific Analysis

California State Universities: Chico, Fullerton, San Bernardino

Jan 13-15, 2025

9:00am-1:00pm PST

Instructors: Robin Donatello, Essia Hamouda, Benjamin Beccera

Helpers: Sanjeet Mann, David Palmquist, Juan Cortes

General Information

The Carpentries project comprises the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry communities of Instructors, Trainers, Maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.

Want to learn more and stay engaged with The Carpentries? Carpentries Clippings is The Carpentries' biweekly newsletter, where we share community news, community job postings, and more. Sign up to receive future editions and read our full archive: https://carpentries.org/newsletter/

Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. 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 "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".

Who: This workshop is open to students, faculty staff and instructors at any California State University. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

REGISTRATION Registration fees are $25, or $10 for students. Register at this link Note: Space is limited; contact the organizers to be placed on a hold list if needed.

Where: Online (Zoom) and in-person at CSU, Chico. Directions and Zoom link will be provided after registration. How to get to MLIB 045. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.

When: Jan 13-15, 2025; 9:00am-1:00pm PST 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:

We are dedicated to providing a positive and accessible learning environment for all. We do not require participants to provide documentation of disabilities or disclose any unnecessary personal information. However, we do want to help create an inclusive, accessible experience for all participants. We encourage you to share any information that would be helpful to make your Carpentries experience accessible. To request an accommodation for this workshop, please fill out the accommodation request form. If you have questions or need assistance with the accommodation form please email us.

Glosario is a multilingual glossary for computing and data science terms. The glossary helps learners attend workshops and use our lessons to make sense of computational and programming jargon written in English by offering it in their native language. Translating data science terms also provides a teaching tool for Carpentries Instructors to reduce barriers for their learners.

Contact: Please email fanh.analytics@gmail.com for more information.

Roles: To learn more about the roles at the workshop (who will be doing what), refer to our Workshop FAQ.

Acknowledgement: This workshop is being offered by Project DA-FANH [grant no. 2021-77040-34880 from the USDA National Institute of Food and Agriculture]. Project DA-FANH aims to foster an active, inclusive, and diverse community of learners and instructors that promote and model the importance of software and data in the Food, Agriculture, Natural Resources and Human Sciences.


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

Introduction to R and RStudio
Project Management using RStudio
short break
Seeking Help
Data Structures
short break
Exploring Data Frames

Day 2

Subsetting Data
Control Flow
short break
Creating Publication-Quality Graphics with ggplot2
short break
Vectorization
Functions Explained

Day 3

Writing Data
Data Frame Manipulation with dplyr
short break
Data Frame Manipulation with tidyr
short break
Writing Good Software

Setup

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

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.

R

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

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.

Video Tutorial

Instructions for R installation on various Linux platforms (debian, fedora, redhat, and ubuntu) can be found at <https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/>. These will instruct you to use your package manager (e.g. for Fedora run sudo dnf install R and for Debian/Ubuntu, add a ppa repository and then run sudo apt-get install r-base). Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

the lesson homepage for instructions to follow to obtain the software and data you will need to follow the lesson.