Summary and Schedule
The goal of this lesson is to provide an introduction to R for learners working with geospatial data. It is intended as a pre-requisite for the R for Raster and Vector Data lesson for learners who have no prior experience using R. This lesson can be taught in approximately 4 hours and covers the following topics:
- Working with R in the RStudio GUI
- Project management and file organization
- Importing data into R
- Introduction to R’s core data types and data structures
- Manipulation of data frames (tabular data) in R
- Introduction to visualization
- Writing data to a file
The R for Raster and Vector Data lesson provides a more in-depth introduction to visualization (focusing on geospatial data), and working with data structures unique to geospatial data.
Getting Started
Data Carpentry’s teaching is hands-on, so participants are encouraged
to use their own computers to insure the proper setup of tools for an
efficient workflow.
This lesson assumes no prior knowledge
of R.
To get started, follow the directions in the “Setup” tab to download data to your computer and follow any installation instructions.
| Setup Instructions | Download files required for the lesson | |
| Duration: 00h 00m | 1. Introduction to R and RStudio |
How to find your way around RStudio? How to interact with R? How to install packages? |
| Duration: 00h 25m | 2. Project Management With RStudio | How can I manage my projects in R? |
| Duration: 00h 40m | 3. Data Structures |
How can I read data in R? What are the basic data types in R? How do I represent categorical information in R? |
| Duration: 01h 35m | 4. Exploring Data Frames | How can I manipulate a data frame? |
| Duration: 02h 05m | 5. Subsetting Data | How can I work with subsets of data in R? |
| Duration: 02h 40m | 6. Data frame Manipulation with dplyr | How can I manipulate dataframes without repeating myself? |
| Duration: 03h 20m | 7. Introduction to Visualization | What are the basics of creating graphics in R? |
| Duration: 03h 55m | 8. Writing Data | How can I save plots and data created in R? |
| Duration: 04h 15m | Finish |
The actual schedule may vary slightly depending on the topics and exercises chosen by the instructor.
This lesson is designed to be taught in conjunction with other lessons in the Data Carpentry Geospatial workshop. For information about required software, and to access the datasets used in this lesson, see the setup instructions on the workshop homepage.