Introducing the blog

My plans for the year are mostly to use this as a space to put up R tutorials for a set of intro seminars I’ll be teaching in Spring 2020. I guess after that we’ll see where it goes!

At the very least I’m hoping this becomes a searchable repository of nice R tutorials with a bent towards programming for research. Here is a completely unorganized list of topics I’m going to be touching on.

Data management and manipulation:

• Tidy data, tidyr, reshape, melt
• Interfacing with databases (sql)
• Working with xml & json
• Research project programming (e.g. cookiecutter, sqlite, etc.)
• High performance data munging with data.table
• Packages for working with weird data formats (e.g. data files from stata, sas, etc.)

Programming:

• Assignment, naming conventions, documenting your code
• Reading, searching, and understanding documentation
• Programming resources
• Pipes & functions
• Version control with git and github

Research:

• Reproducible research with RMarkdown

The WEB:

• What is a website, anyway?
• Webscraping with rvest
• Building static websites with hugo and/or jekyll

Visualization:

• Plotting with ggplot2
• Interactive plots with plotly & highcharts

If you are reading this blog for some reason feel free to reach out and suggest a topic!

This is basically a list of stuff I learned or taught myself that I’ve found valuable for research. Most of what I’m going to go through is in R since that’s my safety blanket, but some of this stuff will apply more broadly.