R Club for Public Health and Social Work

Welcome to our repository!

We are Catalina Canizares and Micaela Lembo, PhD students at the Robert Stempel College of Public Health and Social Work, Florida International University. Our journey in social work and Epidemiology has been significantly enriched by our use of R, a powerful tool for data analysis and visualization. Recognizing the immense value that R brings to research, we are eager to share our knowledge with our colleagues.

With this goal in mind, we have initiated this club aimed at Graduate Students and interested Faculty members who aspire to learn and apply R in their data science endeavors. Through this club, we intend to build a community of R users within our college, fostering a collaborative environment where we can enhance our abilities, share insights, and contribute to each other's research projects.

We have planned a series of sessions for our club:

R Club Session Plan

Session 1: Introduction to R, RStudio, and Package Management

Objective

Familiarize participants with the R environment, RStudio interface, and the basics of package management.

Topics

• Overview of R and its importance in data analysis.
• Installing R and RStudio; navigating the RStudio interface.
• Working in projects
• Basic R syntax: variables, data types, and simple operations.
• Understanding R packages, installing and loading them using install.packages() and library().
• Exploring package documentation.

Activity

Install R and RStudio, execute basic R commands, install a package (e.g., tidyverse), and explore its documentation.

Session 2: Data Manipulation with Tidyverse

Objective

Introduce the Tidyverse suite for data manipulation and visualization, focusing on dplyr and basic ggplot2, including reshaping data with pivot_longer() and pivot_wider().

Topics

• Brief overview of the Tidyverse packages.
• Data manipulation with dplyr (filtering, selecting, mutating, summarizing, and grouping).
• Reshaping data with pivot_longer() and pivot_wider().

Activity

Participants will use dplyr to manipulate a dataset, and practice reshaping data.

Session 3: Introduction to Reproducible Reports with R Markdown and Quarto

Objective: Introduce the concept of reproducible research and reports using R Markdown and Quarto.

Topics:

• What is R Markdown and Quarto?
• Creating a simple report integrating R code and narrative text.
• Exporting reports to different formats (HTML, PDF, Word).

Activity

Create a basic R Markdown document that includes text, code, and outputs.

Session 4: Data Visualization with ggplot2 and Creating Tables

Objective

Expand on basic ggplot2 usage and introduce methods for creating well-formatted tables for reports.

Topics

• Advanced data visualization techniques with ggplot2.
• Customizing plots to improve readability and aesthetics.
• Creating tables with gtsummary, andgt

Activity

Create a visualization that tells a story about a dataset. Generate a report including a well-formatted table.

Session 5: Version Control with GitHub

Objective

Introduce the concept of version control and how to use GitHub for project management and collaboration.

Topics:

• Basics of version control and why it's important.
• Setting up a GitHub account and understanding the GitHub interface.
• Creating repositories, committing changes, and understanding the workflow (clone, add, commit, push).
• Collaborating on projects (forks, branches, pull requests).

Activity: Create a new repository on GitHub and practice making commits and pushing changes.

Session 6: Creating Websites with Quarto

Objective:

Teach participants how to create and publish websites using Quarto, an open-source scientific and technical publishing system built on Pandoc.

Topics:

• Creating static websites with Quarto and customizing the layout and appearance.
• Publishing a Quarto website on GitHub Pages.

Activity:

Participants will create a simple website using Quarto that includes text, code outputs, and visualizations, and then publish it on GitHub Pages.