Cyclocross is a one of those weird sports I’d never heard of until I moved to Portland. Essentially cyclocross is a form of bike racing that entails riding on pavement, trails and grass while occasionally dismounting to carrying your bike over obstacles. Surprisingly cyclocross complements another Portland oddity, the huge number of unimproved roadways in the city. These unpaved roads are great for cyclocross training!
The development of the bookdown package from RStudio in the summer of 2016 has facilitated greatly the ability of educators to create open-source materials for their students to use. It expands to more than just academic settings though and it encourages the sharing of resources and knowledge in a free and reproducible way.
As more and more students and faculty begin to use R in their courses and their research, I wanted to create a resource for the complete beginner to programming and statistics to more easily learn how to work with R. Specifically, the book includes GIF screen recordings that show the reader what specific panes do in RStudio and also the formatting of an R Markdown document and the resulting HTML file.
Continue reading “An introduction to R, RStudio, and R Markdown with GIFs!”In October of 2015, I released an R Markdown senior thesis template R package and discussed it in the blogpost here. It was well-received by students and faculty that worked with it and this past summer I worked on updating it to make it even nicer for students. The big addition is the ability for students to export their senior thesis to a webpage (example here) and also label and cross-reference figures and tables more easily. These additions and future revisions will be in the new thesisdown package in the spirit of the bookdown package developed and released by RStudio in summer 2016.
This is a guest post from Kelly Holob, class of 2014
At Reed, I was a Classics/Religion major (’14), maybe not the sort of person you’d expect to see on a technology blog. But I worked with computers a lot — and not just because I was a T-Watcher. My field’s been developing tools like the TLG, which can search nearly the entire corpus of Greek texts, since the 1970s, and almost anyone who’s taken a class in Latin or Greek knows about Perseus, a easy-to-search collection of public domain classical texts and translations, including lexicons. There’s also Logeion, another lexical tool, which my current school, the University of Chicago, is still developing. Digital Humanities tools have been useful for exploring new ways to learn, interpret, and discover information about everyone from Plato to Plotinus for a long time. Continue reading “Digital humanities and information visualization”
For the economics junior seminar workshop this afternoon, please find datafiles and code here.
Recently, I have been assisting several students with geocoding projects for their classes and thesis projects, using geocoding functionality in R. To document this work I have put together several tutorials and resources for students and faculty to use.
Continue reading “Geocoding”The capacity to create interactive data visualizations in R has been rapidly increasing. Using Shiny, R users can now create dynamic and interactive web-based graphics entirely in RStudio. For example, I am currently working on an interactive map that displays the location of every four-year not-for-profit college in America. Clicking on any college will display a pop-up with information about the college. The graphs on the right of the page will update as you zoom in and out to include only data on the colleges that are currently displayed on the map. Also, there is a second tab at the top of the page called “Data Explorer” that allows you to see the data that is creating the map.
Continue reading “Map of Every Four-Year Not-for-Profit College in America”I will be leading a workshop on Data Visualization tomorrow from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in ETC 205.
Continue reading “Data Visualization Workshop”I will be leading a workshop on R tomorrow from 4:30 to 5:30 pm in ETC 205.
The workshop is designed to be useful for users with all levels of experience. The workshop will include a basic overview of R and RStudio, but will primarily focus on showing students how to make interactive graphs and maps using the googleVis package in R. Everyone in attendance will produce a .html file with a series of interactive data displays.
You can access the slide deck, which was built entirely in R, for the presentation here.
See you tomorrow afternoon!
Last Saturday I gave a presentation at the National Association for College Admission Counseling Conference titled “Matching the Under-Matched Student: Small Colleges and Big Data Offer Strategies for Success.” The presentation used a statistical analysis and case studies from two small liberal arts colleges to identify ways in which colleges may respond to the finding of Hoxby and Avery (2012) that the vast majority of very high-achieving students who are low-income do not apply to any selective college or university.
Continue reading “Data Visualizations and Presentations in R Markdown”
