University of Alberta
October 30th 2018 Instructor: Alex Filazzola
2:00 - 5:00 pm Co-instructors:

General Information

Statistical software that are also programming languages, such as R, are excellent tools for conducting analyses of biological data. However, many users are not taking full advantage of their capabilities. This workshop is an introduction to some of the resources that are available to R users that have been developed and implemented in the larger programming community. No prior knowledge of R will be necessary, but this workshop will not be an introduction to R basics. Instead, we will focus on using R Studio and Github to easily sync your data and analyses online. Within this workshop we will explore how to maximize reproducibility, collaborate internationally on statistical analyses, present data summaries, data management, and the promotion of open science

Who: The course is aimed at R beginners and novice to intermediate analysts. You do not need to have previous knowledge of R.

Where: University of Alberta, Edmonton, CW 410 Conference Room, Campus Map

Requirements: Participants should bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) with administrative privileges. If you want to work along during tutorial, you must have both Git & R studio installed on your own computer (See below for instructions). However, you are still welcome to attend because all examples will be presented via a projector in the classroom.

Contact: Please contact alex.filazzola@outlook.com for more information.

Schedule

Live Notepad

Time Goal
2:00 Meet & greet. Test software
2:10 Github Introduction
2:45 Github and R Studio
3:30 coffee break
3:45 Creating Reports with R Studio
4:30 Publish Reports and websites
4:45 Final discussions

Software

Please install Git before installing R Studio. This allows seamless integration between the two programs because R Studio looks for Git on your computer, but Git does not look for R Studio. In the past, installation in the opposite order has been known to create issues. If you already installed R Studio and Git, but do not see the Git Tab in R Studio then you can follow this support page to troubleshoot.

Git

Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on github.com. You will need a supported web browser (current versions of Chrome, Firefox or Safari, or Internet Explorer version 9 or above).

You will need an account at github.com for parts of the Git lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free and premium accounts are free to students. We encourage you to create a GitHub account if you don’t have one already. Please consider what personal information you’d like to reveal. For example, you may want to review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.

Information on how to install Git for each OS is provided by Software Carpentry and can be found here

R

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

Windows Mac OS X Linux
Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Please also install the RStudio IDE. Install R by downloading and running this .pkg file from CRAN. Please also install the RStudio IDE. You can download the binary files for your distribution from CRAN. Please also install the RStudio IDE

Other workshops

If you enjoyed this workshop and were interested in learning more, I also run a workshop on R-basics and Introduction to Generalized Linear Modelling (GLM) found here. I also have a short introduction on using Functions in R.

You can find similar style workshops, usually that are longer and go into more detail, with Software Carpentry. They have teachers available globally and cover all forms of programming beyond R.