Summary and Setup

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This lesson is designed for librarians and library professionals with little or no prior experience with R to be more acquainted with the programming language. Having a level of familiarity with R is beneficial in assisting users with requests regarding the cleaning, formatting, and visualization with data along for librarians and library professionals themselves when it comes to data they intend to use and analyze for their internal workflows.

Learners will become familiar with both R, R Studio software environment, and the Tidyverse. The R Studio environment allows one to run their code and see the immediate results of one’s code separate panels. While R originally started as a being a statistical programming language, R is used for various applications such as data visualization, deploying of web applications, and creating reproducible documentation. Given the extensive applications of R, we will solely be focusing on importing, cleaning, and visualizing data.

By the end of this lesson, learners will be able to:

  1. Describe what R is and use the basic components of the R Studio software environment.
  2. Apply functions to import data into R and to format data.
  3. Employ functions in the dplyr package to perform data cleaning and transformation.
  4. Use the ggplot2 package to create various types of plots and to change aesthetic features of plots.

Prerequisites

These lessons assume no prior knowledge of the skills or tools, but working through this lesson requires working copies of R and RStudio.

Learners must have R and RStudio installed on their computers. They also need to be able to install a number of R packages, create directories, and download files.

To avoid troubleshooting during the lesson, learners should follow the instruction below to download and install everything beforehand. If they are using their own computers this should be no problem, but if the computer is managed by their organization’s IT department they might need help from an IT administrator.

Install R and RStudio

R and RStudio are two separate pieces of software:

  • R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis
  • RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R easier. In this course we use RStudio to interact with R.

If you don’t already have R and RStudio installed, follow the instructions for your operating system below. You have to install R before you install RStudio.

Windows

  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Windows Vista/7/8/10 (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install it
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
MacOS
  • Download R from the CRAN website.
  • Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
  • Double click on the downloaded file to install R
  • It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages)
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select RStudio x.yy.zzz - Mac OS X 10.6+ (64-bit) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  • Double click the file to install RStudio
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
Linux
  • Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.3.1.
  • Go to the RStudio download page
  • Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  • Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Update R and RStudio

If you already have R and RStudio installed, check if your R and RStudio are up to date:

  • When you open RStudio your R version will be printed in the console on the bottom left. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo() into the console. If your R version is 4.0.0 or later, you don’t need to update R for this lesson. If your version of R is older than that, download and install the latest version of R from the R project website for Windows, for MacOS, or for Linux
  • To update RStudio to the latest version, open RStudio and click on Help > Check for updates. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, follow the instruction on screen.

Note: It is not necessary to remove old versions of R from your system, but if you wish to do so you can check here.

Credits