Introduction to RMarkdown: Setup

Software setup

Please install R and RStudio before this workshop or login to the UIC virtual lab to use the software required for the workshop. See instructions below for both options.

R

R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R, we use RStudio.

Install R by downloading and running this .exe file from CRAN. Also, please install the RStudio IDE. Note that if you have separate user and admin accounts, you should run the installers as administrator (right-click on .exe file and select "Run as administrator" instead of double-clicking). Otherwise problems may occur later, for example when installing R packages.

Video Tutorial

Instructions for R installation on various Linux platforms (debian, fedora, redhat, and ubuntu) can be found at <https://cran.r-project.org/bin/linux/>. These will instruct you to use your package manager (e.g. for Fedora run sudo dnf install R and for Debian/Ubuntu, add a ppa repository and then run sudo apt-get install r-base). Also, please install the RStudio IDE.

Virtual Lab

If you would prefer not to install the software for this workshop on your computer, you may use the Virtual lab service run by Technology Services. This allows you to use a virtual machine either from your web browser or from a desktop app installed on your computer. Overall you may have a better experience using it from the desktop app, but the browswer should suffice for most workshops.

See browser instructions here
See desktop instructions here

Install the videoconferencing client

If you haven't used Zoom before, go to the official website to download and install the Zoom client for your computer.

Set up your workspace

Like other Carpentries workshops, you will be learning by "coding along" with the Instructors. To do this, you will need to have both the window for the tool you will be learning about (a terminal, RStudio, your web browser, etc..) and the window for the Zoom video conference client open. In order to see both at once, we recommend using one of the following set up options:

This blog post includes detailed information on how to set up your screen to follow along during the workshop.

Setup files:

Please download the following files to particpate in the workshop:

R Project zip files

About the Data Used in this Workshop:

This workshop uses an adapted version of the data paper: Nitsch, F. J., Sellitto, M., & Kalenscher, T. (2021). The effects of acute and chronic stress on choice consistency. Psychoneuroendocrinology, 131, 105289. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psyneuen.2021.105289.

The data paper along with its underlying data publicly available at: https://osf.io/6mvq7 were adapted and used for educational purposes with authors’ permission.