Programming – Teaching and Learning with Technology at Reed

An introduction to R, RStudio, and R Markdown with GIFs!

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.

Updated R Markdown thesis template

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.

R Markdown senior thesis template

“Science is reportedly in the middle of a reproducibility crisis.” This is the claim of quite a few these days including an article from ROpenSci which directly references another article by The Conversation. But what is “reproducible research” and how can statistical tools be used to help facilitate it?

Continue reading “R Markdown senior thesis template”

Creating nice tables using R Markdown

One of the neat tools available via a variety of packages in R is the creation of beautiful tables using data frames stored in R. In what follows, I’ll discuss these different options using data on departing flights from Seattle and Portland in 2014. (More information and the source code for this R package is available at https://github.com/ismayc/pnwflights14.) Continue reading “Creating nice tables using R Markdown”

Why should students at a small liberal arts college learn R?

From an educational philosophy perspective, learning to program is well aligned with what we strive to teach our students. Becoming proficient in statistical programming requires the ability to think critically about complex problems, to develop scientific research questions, and to apply rigorous analytical methods to answer your questions. I believe these skills are key elements to a strong liberal arts education. We want our students not only to be able to think critically about the world around them, but to have the skills to critically engage with the world. Continue reading “Why should students at a small liberal arts college learn R?”

Digital humanities and information visualization

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”