Tips and Tricks
What is a Tidyverse-centric approach?
June 3, 2019
I describe my Fundamentals of R course as taking a "Tidyverse-centric approach." If you're new to R, you might be wondering what the heck I'm talking about. Here's my explanation as to what the Tidyverse is and why I use it to teach R. The Tidyverse is described as: ... an opinionated collection of R packages designed for data science. All packages share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures. The Tidyverse consists of multiple packages. When you run the code...
Is R just for data scientists?
May 27, 2019
Take a look at most R courses and they're pitched to aspiring data scientists. They say things like, "learn R and you can get a great job working at one of the many companies that use it to do data science." Take a look at the bios of many of the most prominent R users and you'll see that they are data scientists (or talk about using data science in some other field). Take a look at the most famous book for learning R and what is it called? R for Data Science. So, is R only for data...
My R Journey: Steve Richard
May 21, 2019
Steve Richard works as a data analyst at the Joint Office of Homeless Services (JOHS) in Multnomah County, Oregon. JOHS is an office that was created through an inter-governmental agreement between the city of Portland, Oregon and the County to allocate funds to and manage contracts for social services agencies serving the homeless population in the County. In his role, Steve is responsible for implementing the homeless system's monitoring plan, communicating performance outcomes to various...
Lessons for Learning R
May 2, 2019
This post comes from the R for the Rest of Us newsletter. If you want to get more content like this delivered to your inbox, sign up today. Last week I published the latest post in the My R Journey series. It is with Rika Gorn, Director of Data Analytics & Reporting at Covenant House International. I've followed Rika for a while on Twitter and was especially impressed by the tips and tricks she shared during her week as the We are R Ladies rotating curator. Having now posted several My R...
My R Journey: Rika Gorn
April 23, 2019
Rika Gorn is the Director of Data Analytics & Reporting at Covenant House International, a privately funded agency that provides shelter, immediate crisis care, and other services, to homeless and trafficked youth in the United States, Canada, and Latin America. Her work focuses on providing statistical analysis, data visualization, and reporting support to 21 sites across the agency. Previously, she worked on quality assurance for a mobile mental health team at Coordinated Behavioral Care,...
Three Ways to Do Frequencies in R
April 16, 2019
Need to do frequencies in R? If you're using R, you probably do. Here are three ways you can do them. Each method has one fewer line than the previous one. And, incredibly, the results from the shorter code are more powerful than those from the longer code! Like this video? Check out my Fundamentals of R course.
My R Journey: David Keyes
April 11, 2019
Hi there, I'm David, the one man behind this one-man operation. I've started a series of posts asking others to tell me about their R journeys. It didn't seem fair, though, to not do the same myself. So, here's the story of how I came to learn R, how I use it today, and why I think it's worth learning.Why did you decide to learn R? I'm a PhD social scientist, but I never used R in grad school. Two reasons: 1) I'm an anthropologist and my training was mostly qualitative. 2) The one...
Curb Cuts, Universal Design, and the Creation of a Welcoming R Community
April 9, 2019
In 1971, the city council of Berkeley, California authorized the construction of curb cuts at fifteen high-traffic street corners. This came after years of protests by disability rights activists, who argued that sidewalks without curb cuts were discriminatory because those in wheelchairs could not traverse them. After these curb cuts were built, people began to realize that they helped not only those in wheelchairs, but everyone. As Deborah Kaplan told the podcast 99 Percent Invisible, What...
R's Killer Feature: RMarkdown
March 29, 2019
Recently I've been talking with people considering learning R about RMarkdown. In my experience, when people think about switching to R, they often think about it as a direct replacement for the tool they currently use (i.e. Excel, SPSS, SAS, Stata, etc.). R can do everything that these tools do, of course, but RMarkdown is one of the features that is most likely to fundamentally transform their work. When I try to explain RMarkdown to people, they often struggle a) to understand what it is,...