Lesson on spreadsheets for social scientists. Good data organization is the foundation of any research project. Most researchers have data in spreadsheets, so it’s the place that many research projects start. Typically we organize data in spreadsheets in ways that we as humans want to work with the data. However computers require data to be organized in particular ways. In order to use tools that make computation more efficient, such as programming languages like R or Python, we need to structure our data the way that computers need the data. Since this is where most research projects start, this is where we want to start too! In this lesson, you will learn: Good data entry practices - formatting data tables in spreadsheets How to avoid common formatting mistakes Approaches for handling dates in spreadsheets Basic quality control and data manipulation in spreadsheets Exporting data from spreadsheets In this lesson, however, you will not learn about data analysis with spreadsheets. Much of your time as a researcher will be spent in the initial ‘data wrangling’ stage, where you need to organize the data to perform a proper analysis later. It’s not the most fun, but it is necessary. In this lesson you will learn how to think about data organization and some practices for more effective data wrangling. With this approach you can better format current data and plan new data collection so less data wrangling is needed.

Data Carpentry lesson to learn how to work with Amazon AWS cloud computing and how to transfer data between your local computer and cloud resources. The cloud is a fancy name for the huge network of computers that host your favorite websites, stream movies, and shop online, but you can also harness all of that computing power for running analyses that would take days, weeks or even years on your local computer. In this lesson, you’ll learn about renting cloud services that fit your analytic needs, and how to interact with one of those services (AWS) via the command line.

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 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.

This lesson in part of Software Carpentry workshop and teach novice programmers to write modular code and best practices for using R for data analysis. an introduction to R for non-programmers using gapminder data The goal of this lesson is to teach novice programmers to write modular code and best practices for using R for data analysis. R is commonly used in many scientific disciplines for statistical analysis and its array of third-party packages. We find that many scientists who come to Software Carpentry workshops use R and want to learn more. The emphasis of these materials is to give attendees a strong foundation in the fundamentals of R, and to teach best practices for scientific computing: breaking down analyses into modular units, task automation, and encapsulation. Note that this workshop will focus on teaching the fundamentals of the programming language R, and will not teach statistical analysis. The lesson contains more material than can be taught in a day. The instructor notes page has some suggested lesson plans suitable for a one or half day workshop. A variety of third party packages are used throughout this workshop. These are not necessarily the best, nor are they comprehensive, but they are packages we find useful, and have been chosen primarily for their usability.

Una introducción a R utilizando los datos de Gapminder. El objetivo de esta lección es enseñar a las programadoras principiantes a escribir códigos modulares y adoptar buenas prácticas en el uso de R para el análisis de datos. R nos provee un conjunto de paquetes desarrollados por terceros que se usan comúnmente en diversas disciplinas científicas para el análisis estadístico. Encontramos que muchos científicos que asisten a los talleres de Software Carpentry utilizan R y quieren aprender más. Nuestros materiales son relevantes ya que proporcionan a los asistentes una base sólida en los fundamentos de R y enseñan las mejores prácticas del cómputo científico: desglose del análisis en módulos, automatización tareas y encapsulamiento. Ten en cuenta que este taller se enfoca en los fundamentos del lenguaje de programación R y no en el análisis estadístico. A lo largo de este taller se utilizan una variedad de paquetes desarrolados por terceros, los cuales no son necesariamente los mejores ni se encuentran explicadas todas sus funcionalidades, pero son paquetes que consideramos útiles y han sido elegidos principalmente por su facilidad de uso.