Creating compelling visualizations is an important aspect of biomedical research. The R programming language provides many libraries for creating beautiful figures and interactive web apps. As R is an open source project, it facilitates open science and reproducible research. R has been heavily used by bioinformaticians and data scientists for years, and has become increasingly easy to use. This course is designed to allow researchers to quickly dive into R and make visualizations for their own work. No previous experience in R is required.
After this course you will be able to:
- Load and prepare data for plotting
- Generate common scientific plots like Bar graphs, scatter plots, and heat maps using multiple plotting libraries
- Use git, GitHub and binder to share plots
- Use visualizations to explore new data
- Combine multiple plots to create publication quality figures
- Design interactive web apps with R-Shiny
- Integrate plots from R into posters and papers
- Complete a final project with your own data
The workshop is structured as a series of interactive lessons, with a lecture and exercises components. Our engagement during this workshop will take several forms:
- Class materials: All materials, including lecture slides and excercises will be availble on canvas, and the course Github repository
- All lessons will be held live over Zoom
- Communications: There will be a slack group created for the class.
We will have a session to install all software before the course. Some of the main software we will be using:
- Software
- R language base system - the core interpreter for the R language that runs the code we will write
- Rstudio - an integrated devleopment environment(IDE) that makes it signficantly easier to write code
- GitHub - students will sign up for GitHub, an online repository for code.
- GDAL - software for using maps in R
- Materials
- A computer, ideally with administrative access
- Multiple screens(2 monitors, computer + tablet/phone etc)
Office hours will be held at the end of each day from 3-4PM.
Q. Do I need any Prior Experience in R A. No, This class requires NO expreience in R. We will cover everything you need to know within the course.
Q. I don't have administrative access to my computer, how will I be able to install the necessary software? A. While it's best to work on your own machine, a standalone cloud based environment will be available for people to use. This environment can launched by clicking the badge at the top of this document