Introduction to R

I just ran an introduction-to-R one day workshop here at the Sheffield Methods Institute on behalf of AQMeN. The aim was to introduce people with no previous experience of R to RStudio, data wrangling with the various tidyverse libraries and outputting some plots/visualisations with ggplot.

I’ll be updating the course based on experience of this first one, but if you want a go, the course booklet is written assuming no previous knowledge and should, in theory, work for self-learning. It’s all based on open access data so it’s available to everyone. If you’re interested:

  • go pick a city from here. Each is a zipped up RStudio project with that city/town’s travel-to-work area plus London.

  • Make sure you’ve got RStudio and R installed.

  • Look in the course_materials folder of your unzipped RStudio project: there’s a PDF there (and an HTML doc) with the course in. (Or the HTML one is online here.) It’ll explain how to open it in RStudio and get going.

The booklet runs through a typical data wrangling scenario using Land Registry ‘price paid’ data: a record of every property sale in England and Wales since 1995. It also does some data linkage, getting geographies from Ordnance Survey Code-Point Open data that gives precise locations for Great Britain postcodes. (CodePoint Open is some way down the list on that page.)

Any comments/suggestions, do let me know (d dot older at sheffield dot ac dot uk).

  • Note: the course uses data I’ve already got into a rather more useable form, to keep the focus on the essentials. If you want to know how to get from the original downloaded data, take a look at the preparation code. Though it ain’t pretty… which in itself is salutory: writing this stuff up can present a sanitised version of coding reality that appears way more ordered than it really is.

  • Note note: the full data prep code includes an explanation of how the postcodes were used to geocode geographies into a lookup, so serve as a real-data intro to geocoding in R. This code uses two (also open access) zone shapefiles: Travel-to-work areas (TTWAs) and ward shapefiles for England from the Census Edina boundary data download site. (TTWAs are in ‘England / Other / 2001-2010, wards are from England / Census / English Census Merged Wards 2011.)

center