DiSC R Lessons
A shortened link to this page is vanderbi.lt/r.
About the lessons
DiSC R lessons are provided by the Digital Scholarship and Communications Office (DiSC) of the Jean and Alexander Heard Libraries at Vanderbilt University. The DiSC office provides regular lessons for R beginners with a variety of followup intermediate and advanced lessons. There is no cost associated with the lessons.
The beginners lessons are generally offered at least once per semester. In the fall semester of 2021, we are also offering an intermediate series on data visualization using ggplot. See the schedules below for session details.
During the fall of 2021, we are planning to offer the lessons in-person, although it is also possible to participate remotely via Zoom. Advance registration is required to participate remotely. It is recommended, but not required to participate in-person. To register, go to the link at the appropriate schedule below. After registering, you will receive a confirmation email containing information about joining the Zoom session.
Each lesson includes of a series of videos with a practice scripts and homework assignments. The live working sessions provide an opportunity for participants to ask questions about the lesson videos and homework, or to work on the homework with assistance.
The lessons are part of a free, online learning system called CodeGraf. You are welcome to work through these lessons or any of the other lesson modules available in CodeGraf on your own at any time (no registration required). To explore all of the lesson modules that are available, visit the CodeGraf landing page.
The DiSC office also provides lessons for learning Python and getting started with GitHub in a similar format.
Beginners Lessons - Fall 2021
Wednesdays from 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Central (US) Time (starting Sep 1).
NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE: Central Library Poetry Room - 612A (Sep 1 through 29) and Central Library room 800BB on October 6 ONLY.
Please register using this Zoom registration link even if you plan to attend in-person. This will give you the opportunity to participate by Zoom if you can’t make one of the live sessions. Registration link
If you don’t already have RStudio installed on your computer, I recommend starting with RStudio Cloud. It behaves exactly like RStudio desktop but does not require any installation. Create an account at https://rstudio.cloud/ before the first lesson to save time.
Instructor (Steve Baskauf) office hours information, or email steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu to arrange another time to talk.
| Working session date | Lesson | Topic | Web pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 1 | 1 | Introduction, installation troubleshooting | terminology (18 min) / programming environments (50 min) / installation videos (10 min) Stop on the page after the Installing Anaconda section. / example script |
| Sep 8 | 2 | Basics: Vectors and vectorized computing, packages | lesson videos (50 min) |
| Sep 15 | 3 | Lists and dataframes, tibbles | lesson videos (40 min) |
| Sep 22 | 4 | Missing data, basic stats, basic plots | lesson videos (47 min) |
| Sep 29 | 5 | Tidy Data and basic data wrangling | lesson videos (31 min) |
| Oct 6 (room 800BB) | 6 | More data wrangling and piping | lesson videos (46 min) |
Introduction to data visualization with ggplot (Intermediate topic) - Fall 2021
This hands-on lesson series will quickly get you started using the R library ggplot to create data visualizations. These lessons assume that you have a basic familiarity with R and RStudio. However, those with no background can still participate by trying and modifying the provided code examples. To visualize your own data, you will want to work through the beginner lessons (offered concurrently, see above) either on your own, or as part of the lesson cohort.
Fridays from 1:00 PM - 2:00 PM Central (US) Time (starting Sep 3).
NOTE CHANGE OF VENUE: Central Library Poetry Room - 612A (Sep 3 - Oct 1) and Central Library room 800BB on October 8 ONLY.
Please register using this Zoom registration link even if you plan to attend in-person. This will give you the opportunity to participate by Zoom if you can’t make one of the live sessions. Registration link
Instructor (Steve Baskauf) office hours information, or email steve.baskauf@vanderbilt.edu to arrange another time to talk.
The topics below are provisional and subject to change
| Working session date | Lesson | Topics | Web pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sep 3 | 1 | Grammar of Graphics, 3 common geoms, formatting | lesson videos (25 min) |
| Sep 10 | 2 | controlling asthetics like color and size, labels | lesson webpage |
| Sep 17 | 3 | stats: binning, distributions, error bars | lesson webpage |
| Sep 24 | 4 | complex plots: faceting, overlaying, stacking | |
| Oct 1 | 5 | TBD | |
| Oct 8 (room 800BB) | 6 | TBD |
R Resources
Here’s a page of R resources that include a number of online lessons for R beginners.
O’Reilly for Higher Education books and videos (Vanderbilt sign-in required)
Bivariate tests example code - Requires installation of the MVN library lesson slides
Other sources of R resources on Vanderbilt’s campus
Data Science Institute (DSI) https://www.vanderbilt.edu/datascience/
Research IT https://research.vanderbilt.edu/researchadministration/about/research-it/
Digital Humanities (DH) Center https://www.vanderbilt.edu/digitalhumanities/
Software Carpentries (cosponsored by DiSC, Office of the Vice Provost for Research, Research IT, ACCRE, and the Data Science Institute)
TBD
Questions? contact Steve Baskauf
Revised 2021-08-30
Questions? Contact us
License: CC BY 4.0.
Credit: "Vanderbilt Libraries Digital Scholarship and Communications - www.library.vanderbilt.edu"