Alex Michel recently graduated from the OHSU-PSU School of Public Health in Portland, Oregon with a Master of Public Health. She’s worked in science communication and science writing for about 10 years and hopes to continue to use R to improve public access and engagement with research. Why did you decide to learn R? I first really got interested in R when I saw a guy who was making these really great graphs that also used these hilarious color palettes inspired by the nineties X-Men cartoon...
Many of the clients I work with are coming from Excel. When I teach them R, I try to relate new information to things they are already familiar with. In that spirit, I've put together a short video that shows some key functions ( select , mutate , filter , summarize , group_by , and arrange ) from the dplyr package in R. If you've ever wondered, say, what the equivalent of the filter function would be in Excel, I've got you covered! A rendered version of the RMarkdown document used in the...
From 2005 to 2007, I was a second grade teacher at Bel Pre Elementary School in Silver Spring, Maryland. It was the hardest job I've ever done. But I learned so much about teaching during that time (as well as my education master's program) that it was anything but a waste. Recently, I've been reflecting on ways that I'm incorporating lessons learned from my time working with young students into how I've designed my Fundamentals of R course for (slightly) older students. Lesson #1: Go Slow...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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 ,...
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 .
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...
