Software Carpentry - R

On 4th and 5th February, Advanced Research Computing are hosting a Software Carpentry workshop for researchers at the University of Birmingham. Please note attendance is at BOTH half day sessions on the afternoons of 4th and 5th from 1-4pm.

The Carpentries are a fiscally sponsored project of Community Initiatives. They teach skills that are immediately useful for researchers, using lessons and datasets that allow researchers to quickly apply what they’ve learned to their own work. We're really excited about using the Software Carpentry curriculum here to help our researchers become more efficient in their research. This workshop is focused on programming with R.

Course Objectives

By the end of this course, you should be able to:

• Install R and RStudio on your own machine
• Launch RStudio and navigate the interface
• Understand how R works with variables, vectors, dataframes and datatypes
• Read datasets into R
• Explore and prepare data using the dplyr package
• Make a range of plots using the ggplot2 package
• Understand how to create, save, and re-run programs

The target audience is learners who have little to no prior computational experience, and the instructors put a priority on creating a friendly environment to empower researchers and enable data-driven discovery. Even those with some experience will benefit, as the goal is to teach not only how to do analyses, but how to manage the process to make it as automated and reproducible as possible. Space is limited and it will likely fill quickly.

Please note that our courses are for research staff and research students only. Taught students - undergraduate and postgraduate - are not eligible to attend.