Unleashing the power of R
by Scott Ritchie
Recently we taught an intermediate R workshop for The Quantitative and Applied Ecology Group (QAECO). QAECO is a tight-knit group of researchers with varied experience in R. Experienced programmers paired off with novices, and their familiarity with each other made for a fantastic, interactive workshop!
Learning about functions with @JovMaksimovic at the @swcarpentry @qaecology workshop! @ResPlat #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/kmT8aGesjC
— Scott Ritchie (@sritchie73)
July 7, 2015
The spearhead of the workshop organisation was a PhD candidate, Saras Windecker, who had attended our ResBaz conference at the beginning of the year. Together, we were able to build an outline of a curriculum better suited to her group.
The theme of the workshop was “efficiently working with data”. We covered several useful packages for data analysis while still covering the core programming concepts taught by software carpentry. At the end of the session, another QAECO student, Will Morris took over for a half day, taught us about package development for paper publishing, as well as the very cool magrittr!
Another highlight of the workshop was our “project workflows” session. This covered effective project organisation and Git from R Studio. At the end of the session we typed up some basic workflows for starting new projects.
Researchers from @qaecology learning how to set up a collaborative project on GitHub @swcarpentry @ResPlat #ResBaz pic.twitter.com/epXl8cpswB
— Scott Ritchie (@sritchie73)
July 2, 2015
We’re currently typing up notes from the workshop in order to create intermediate materials for other audiences who are already familiar with R. As a sneak peak you can look at the work in progress here!