Welcome to the Harvard Informatics Introduction to R workshop!

This web page will guide you through some of the activities we have planned for you today!

Instructors

Tim Sackton: Director of the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University.

Adam Freedman: A bioinformatics scientist in the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University.

Gregg Thomas: A bioinformatics scientist in the FAS Informatics group at Harvard University and recent postdoc at the University of Montana where he studied the phylogenetics and comparative genomics of the mouse and rat radiation. He got his PhD at Indiana University where he worked on comparative genomics of arthropods, mutation rate evolution in primates, and convergent evolution using comparative genomics. In general, Gregg uses and develops computational methods to study molecular evolution and phylogenetics to determine what forces drive divergence and adaptation between species.

Workshop Summary & Outline

This workshop aims to introduce first-time users to the R programming language and the RStudio development environment. We will provide a basic introduction to coding in R and then shift to data manipulation using the tidyverse, a set of R libraries designed to handle data tables in a consistent and easy way. Then, we'll learn how to generate some basic plots to explore our data using ggplot. You do not need any prior programming experience to take this workshop. But also note that this workshop is not a comprehensive programming class nor a comprehensive statistics class. The main goal of this workshop is to get you familiar with reading your data into R and performing basic operations and generating figures.

Here is a brief outline of the topics we'll be covering:

Day 1: Introduction to R

Wednesday March 1st, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm: Biolabs 2062/2064
  • Opening RStudio and learning about its interface
  • Executing R commands in the Console
  • Writing an R script
  • R objects and object types

Day 2: Introduction to the tidyverse

Thursday March 2nd, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm: CGIS South, S250 Porte Seminar Room
  • Installing the tidyverse
  • Tibbles
  • Filtering and manipulating data tables (tibbles)
  • Piping

Day 3: Introduction to ggplot

Wednesday March 8th, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm: Biolabs 2062/2064
  • Generating basic plots with ggplot
  • Aesthetic & layers
  • Various plot types
  • Colors and grouping data

Day 4: Advanced topics

Thursday March 30th, 9:30 am - 12:30 pm: CGIS South, S250 Porte Seminar Room
  • Writing functions
  • Custom data filtering & manipulation
  • Working with your own data

Click the Get Started link below to read some info before class. Additional links to resources will appear for each day of the workshop.


Get Started