Intro to R workshop

Last week, I had a pleasure to conduct a workshop for graduate students and faculty in the Department of Geography and GIS at the University of Cincinnati. In two afternoons, a group of mostly beginners, learned a little bit about R, RStudio, data processing, and visualisation, as well as about spatial data analysis in R.

The workshop had four parts:

1. Intro to R. It introduces basics of R, such as assignment operator, functions, objects, classes, and data types. In this part participants also learn about very useful bits – keyboard shortcuts, how to get help, and what is RStudio project. Slides and data are available here
2. Intro to data processing. It starts with how to index vectors and data frames. Afterwards, basic use of dplyr and tidyr are presented. This part ends with the introduction of the %>% operator. Slides and data are available here
3. Intro to data visualisation. It explains idea behind ggplot2 and shows how to create and modify plots in this package. At the end, two packages for interactive plots are introduced – plotly and dygraphs. Slides and data are available here
4. Intro to spatial analysis. The last part give an introduction to spatial capabilities of R. Basics of vector data processing are shown with examples in sf and sp, and basic of raster data with the raster package. Spatial data visualisation is presented with rasterVis, tmap, and leaflet. This part ends with a description of many R packages for downloading of spatial data, such as tigris and rnaturalearth. Slides and data are available here

Moreover, each part ends with a list of useful resources – let me know if I missed something.