Introduction to R (and RStudio)

Welcome to this workshop on R and R studio! In this session, participants will learn the basics of coding in R, and will become familiar with using RStudio. We will cover creating objects, importing and working with data, using the basic libraries, and performing simple operations.

This session is suitable for beginners with no prior knowledge of R. There are no prerequisite coding skills. While the examples and data used will be aimed at the Humanities and Social Sciences community, the session is open to anyone and everyone interested in learning about R.

Learning outcomes

1. Learn to use RStudio
2. Become familiar with the basic syntax and concepts of R
3. Be able to create projects and organized working directories
4. Become familiar with R packages, including ‘tidyverse’ and ‘ggplot2’
5. Be able to conduct basic data analysis and visualisations

Before we start

To start, you’ll need to download both R and RStudio. Click here to download R, and here to download RStudio.

For the project portion of the workshop, we’ll be using the cleaned up messy movies data. If you have yours from the OpenRefine workshop, feel free to use that! If not, you can download the unmessy_movies.csv data here.

I'd encourage you to follow along with the workshop in R, but if you get lost or want to check something, you can download my script.

Instructor: Maria Sigridur Finnsdottir, PhD

This workshop was developed by drawing on the UBC Library course Intro to R and RStudio (beginner) and the Data Carpentries course R for Social Scientists.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Non-Commerical Attribution 4.0 International License.