Before we get started, it helps to have an overview of the class. First, what is the class for? Second, what do we hope to learn and why is this important for people who work in the social and behavioural sciences? Third, if we do want to do this class, what do we need to do to get started?
The course begins with an introduction to data visualisation in R using the ggplot2 package. It is assumed that this is our first encounter with R, so this section also covers many introductory topics.
The second section discusses how to read data into R and how to write output to CSV files, and introduces some of the tools used to create grouped summaries of data. In this section we first encounter the ‘pipe’ operator %>%.
An introduction to data manipulation and data wrangling in R using the dplyr package. Topics covered include: extracting a subset of the data, rearranging the data, computing new variables in a data set, merging multiple data sets, and reshaping a data set.
The fourth section in the class is built around a concrete problem: how can we build a website using R? In doing so it provides an overview of how to use R markdown and blogdown, and familiarises you with git and github
The fifth section in the course is an art class, of sorts. Notionally the goal is to build a new generative art system, but it also serves as a mechanism to introduce key programming concepts: vectors, lists, coercion, logical operations, loops and conditionals.
The sixth section is also an art class, this time focused on writing functions and using the functional programming toolkit in the purrr package. There is also some art though, I promise!
