R on The Carpentries

Updating our Lesson Setup Instructions

Wed, 12 Mar 2025 00:00:00 +0000

The Lesson Setup Instructions Task Force was established in August 2024 to review existing setup instructions for Data Carpentry, Library Carpentry, and Software Carpentry lessons and decide where and how these instructions should be updated. Members of the task force considered a wide range of options for installing Bash, Git, Python, and R, and engaged in many constructive discussions. The task was challenging, and the “best” option was often difficult to identify.

Introducing R lessons in Japanese

Wed, 24 Feb 2021 00:00:00 +0000

Software Carpentry lessons in Japanese

As previously discussed we have a Japanese language team aiming to maintain a community-led translation of the core Software Carpentry lesson. See our previous posts on how we got started and how we manage collaborative translations via GitHub. Our team has grown internationally in the age of online meetings with contributions from Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Indonesia, and the USA. We hope this will support growing the Carpentries community in Japan and Carpentries lessons for Japanese learners overseas.

Upgrading R Lessons to use R 4.0

Mon, 03 Aug 2020 00:00:00 +0000

Summary and timeline

In April 2020, R officially released version 4.0. One of the major changes was the removal of the default stringsAsFactors = TRUE when reading in data frames. This was tentatively announced in late July 2019 and officially announced in February 2020. While this change has been seen as a good thing by the majority of the R community as a step towards reducing common pitfalls, it produces an interesting pedagogical challenge for some of our lessons that use errors and warnings generated from this default behavior as mechanisms to introduce learners to the concept of factors.

Fourteen and Counting - People's Favorite Tools

Mon, 08 Jan 2018 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Thank you to all the people who have sent in short posts about their favourite tools. We are up to fourteen now, and the variety of tools is great to see. Finding out what other people use - and possibly more importantly - why they use it, and for what, is a great shortcut for researchers. There are a bewildering number of research tools around. Getting a tip from someone in your discipline, or from someone who is doing a similar task to you, can really help.

satRday Cape Town 2018

Sun, 03 Dec 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

satRdays are community-led, regional conferences to support collaboration, networking and innovation within the R community.

satRdays are the brainchild of Stephanie Locke, and were inspired to a large extent by the success of SQLSaturdays. SQLSaturdays focus on developing technical knowledge around SQL Server and related technologies. The first SQLSaturday was held in 2007, and there are now well over 100 events across the globe.

People's Favorite Tools

Wed, 29 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

A big thank you to everyone who has responded so far to the call for short posts about their favourite tools.

So far we have had Paula Martinez on R, with Bianca Peterson enthusiastically seconding, Jeff Oliver sharing his love of Git and GitHub, Kellie Ottoboni talking up IPython, and Thomas Arildsen on how the Jupyter Notebook facilitates his teaching. Juliane Schneider weighed in on the wonders of OpenRefine. Clifton Franklund likes RStudio, while Francesco Montanari is a fan of emacs.

My Favourite Tool - RStudio

Tue, 07 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

My favorite tool is RStudio. This integrated development environment (IDE) is really a force multiplier for data analysis and reporting.

RStudio provides an excellent interface to the R programming language (that much should be obvious). However, it is much more than that. This application affords me easy workflows and shortcuts to interact with most of the other tools that I regularly use. These include:

My Favourite Tool - R

Mon, 06 Nov 2017 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

R can do anything - from making presentations, analyzing and plotting data to version control (Git).

I use it for absolutely everything! It’s not difficult to use and it’s free!

– Bianca Peterson, Temporary lecturer (Microbiology) & Project Coordinator (IT), South Africa

Have you got a favourite tool you would like to tell us about? Please use this form to add a bit of detail and we will do the rest. You can read the background to these posts here, or see what other tools people have written about.

Maintaining a Lesson

Mon, 04 Apr 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

After two years as a Software Carpentry lesson maintainer of r-novice-inflammation, I am stepping down so that I can spend more time on my research (this thesis appears unwilling to write itself) and with my family. This therefore seems like a good time to summarize what’s happened and what I’ve learned for the benefit of anyone planning to become a maintainer.

A Bit of Background

Software Carpentry really started growing the number of workshops and instructors in 2012. At the time, there were two main sets of lessons in place: the version 4 SWC lessons written by Greg Wilson and others in 2010-11, and a set developed by The Hacker Within, a student group at the University of Wisconsin - Madison. (These were referred to as the THW lessons, and can be found in the old boot-camps repository.)

Presenting Materials for Intermediate UseRs

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

We’ve been teaching R workshops for over a year now at the University of Melbourne, and one thing we’ve noticed is the disparity in skill level among workshop attendees. Researchers generally fall into one of two catergories:

Absolute novices: those who have heard of R, but have never touched a programming language before.
Regular users: those who are using R in their research, possibly on a regular basis. They can modify scripts, and have a general understanding of the language basics, but want to extend their knowledge.

Improving RStudio as a Teaching Tool

Thu, 20 Aug 2015 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

On Twitter, the RStudio support team requested suggestions for how to make RStudio better as a teaching tool. So I've started an issue on their support site for instructors to chime in with ideas. Go ahead and let them know what would make teaching with RStudio easier and better!

Presenting the Novice R Materials and Future Plans for the SWC R Community

Mon, 20 Oct 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

Approximately seven months after our initial meeting, the SWC R community has developed the first set of R lessons for use both in workshops and for self-directed learning from the SWC website. These novice R lessons are a translation of the current novice Python lessons.

rOpenSci Hackathon

Wed, 12 Feb 2014 00:00:00 +0000

This post originally appeared on the Software Carpentry website.

The rOpenSci team has been cranking out a large number of software tools over the past several months. As regular blog readers are aware, our software packages provide programmatic access to a diverse and extensive trove of scientific data. More recently we've expanded our efforts to build more general purpose and cross-domain tools. These include tools for reading, writing, integrating and publishing data, a unit testing platform for data, and a mapping engine that can visualize various kinds of spatial data. Many of our projects are inspired by ad hoc discussions with other scientists and software developers both online (often on Twitter and GitHub) and offline. Several of these folks are now regular contributors to the project. To foster more such collaborations and drive new software innovations, we are excited to announce our first developer meeting next month at GitHub's headquarters in San Francisco. This meeting is made possible by support from the Alfred P. Sloan foundation and GitHub.