Basics in R Talent voor Onderzoek 2021
30 March & 1 April 2021
Rik Vosters
Faculty of Languages and Humanities
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Click the green 'CODE' button and chose 'DOWNLOAD ZIP' to download all the files to your computer. Then unpack the ZIP archive and open the "_workshop - script.R" file in RStudio.
This course will offer a gentle introduction to R, especially aimed at students and aspiring researchers who do not have any experience programming. We will first deal with basic operations, data structures and programming in the R language, and then move on to working with sample data. We will deal with basic descriptive statistics, as well as paramatric and non-parametric inferential statistics. In addition, we will pay ample attention to data exploration and data visualization.
The course will be relatively slow-paced, so that also people who have no experience in programming can follow along. Also, we will spend a fair share of our time in class practicising the concepts learned, so students can try to familiarize themselves with the material at their own pace.
This course should provide you with a solid basis which you can use to then further read up on and specialize in the types of analyses you need for your own research. During the course, we will also discuss resources and strategies on how to independently find out more information on particular types of analysis which are not covered in this basic course.
After this course, you should have a basic understanding of the workings of R, and you should be able to use it to load your own data and carry out basic graphical and descriptive statistical explorations on your data. Also, you should have acquired sufficient background knowledge in order to know what the possibilities are in terms of some more advanced analyses, and where you can find the necessary resources to delve into those sorts of analysis on your own.
No previous experience with R is required. Some basic knowledge of very basic descriptive statistics is recommended. Important: you will need to bring your own laptop computer to the course, with the R package (https://cran.r-project.org) and the visual interface RStudio (https://www.rstudio.com) already installed. If this is a problem, contact the course instructor in advance.
This course will deal with:
- An introduction to working with R and RStudio
- Data structures and data classes in R
- Basic programming functions to carry out common, repetitive tasks (e.g. loops, writing your own functions, etc.)
- Data import, data cleaning and data transformation (using the Tidyverse framework)
- Some basics of working with textual data in R (time permitting)
- Data exploration and descriptive statistics (e.g. mean, medians, measures of dispersion, etc.)
- Data visualization with the base package and ggplot (e.g. barplots, scatterplots, histograms, etc.)
Note that this course is not an introduction to statistics, which will be dealt with in a follow-up course, building on this ‘basics in R’ module.
Online material (scripts, notes and exercises) available on https://github.com/rikvosters/Basics-in-R-TVO
Prof. Dr. Rik Vosters
Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies
Faculty of Languages and Humanities
Vrije Universiteit Brussel