R Workshops
In grad school I offered workshops on a variety of topics relating to R between Fall 2017 and Spring 2020. They were held Fridays at 3:30 in the DigiLab at the UGA Main Library. Videos for some of these are available here. Below you will find materials for these workshops. I hope they are thorough enough that you can make use of them as stand-alone documents.
The data used in these workshops can be found at my datasets page.
If you are planning on attending a workshop in the near future, please see the setup instructions to help you get R and RStudio installed on your computer.
Intro to R (Part 1 and Part 2)
In this first workshop I cover the basics of R itself. I talk about the differences between R and RStudio and I help folks get both installed and running on their computers. We create a simple “Hello, World!” script using R. Part 2 covers the basics of the R language. It is also be a very simple introduction to some core computer coding concepts like declaring variables and variable types.
Additional Materials: You may also be interested in a PDF of the slides I used in Part 1 or a PDF version of Part 2’s handout. An older version that combines elements of both parts can be found here as a PDF or RMarkdown file.
Visualizations with ggplot2
ggplot2 is a widely used package that allows for high-quality visualizations. These workshops take you from installation to pretty advanced topics.
Part 1: Intro to ggplot2
In Part 1 of this workshop I cover the basic syntax and how to make some simple types of plots.
Part 2: Extending your ggplot2 skills
Often you’ll want to customize your plots in some way. So, in Part 2, we cover how to mess with properties of the plots like the axes, colors, and legends to make the plot work better for you.
Supplement to Part 2
Apparently I had a lot to say about how to extend your ggplot2 skills, so I ended up creating a supplement with lots of additional detail on how to modify your plots. This handout will vary from time to time as I add to it when I learn new things or remove sections to incorporate them into future workshops.
Custom Themes
Based on a popular blog post I wrote, this workshop wraps all customization methods together and shows how to create your own themes.
Supplement: A detailed look at ggplot2::theme
As I was preparing for the custom themes workshop, I got a little carried away illustrating all the components of the theme function. I decided to simplify that portion of the workshop and create this separate handout that just focuses on theme. It is not yet finished, but it may be of some help to people (including myself!).
Introduction to the Tidyverse (Part 1 and Part 2)
The tidyverse is a suite of packages that includes dplyr and tidyr which help you wrangle your data. In this two-part workshop, we learn some of the common functions in the tidyverse and compare them to base R, showing that there are multiple ways to accomplish the same task in R. Part 2 in particular looks at how to reshape and transform your data, merging it with other dataset, and other super useful and powerful tools.
An Intro to RMarkdown
R Markdown is a way to create different types of documents using R (pdfs, word files, html files). In this one-day crash course, I show how to make R Markdown files and the kinds of things they would be useful for.
Additional Materials: If you’d rather use a PDF of the workshop materials, there’s one available here.
Introduction to Shiny
Shiny is an R package that allows you to make your own interactive web pages. An entire semester could be devoted to Shiny and there’s a bit of a learning curve, especially if you haven’t used HTML before. This two-day workshop covers just the essentials.
The materials for this workshop include interactive shiny elements, which means I can’t host them on my own website. So instead, they’re hosted on Shiny’s free server space. But this comes with a major drawback: they’re only available for 25 user-hours a month. So, if the link above does not work for you, try again in a week or so. Sorry for the inconvenience.