St. Louis River Summit Data Workshop: Setup

Pre-workshop setup steps

  1. Install the following software (all instructions are below).
    • R
    • RStudio, an integrated development environment for R
    • tidyverse package, a collection of functions we’ll use throughout the workshop
  2. After you have installed everything above, download nerr_data.zip. You’ll need the files included during the workshop.
    1. Move nerr_data.zip to your Desktop and unzip it (double-clicking on Macs; right-click and “Extract All” on Windows).
      • Note: In Windows, by default files will be unzipped into a folder called “nerr_data” within another folder called “nerr_data”. To prevent this, when asked where to extract, remove the “nerr_data” that shows up after Desktop, so that the file path looks something like “C\Users\your.username\Desktop”. Alternatively, you can copy the files in the “inside” nerr_data folder to the “outside” nerr_data folder and then safely delete that empty folder.
    2. Start up RStudio. In the upper left menu, select File > Open. In the window that opens, go to the nerr_data/ folder on your Desktop and select the file check_setup.R to open it in RStudio.
    3. Click the Source button to run the script. This script will make sure that everything is installed and setup correctly. You should see output printed to the console window (usually the lower left pane in RStudio).
    4. Take a screenshot of the console output (or copy & paste it) into an email and send it to the lead instructor.

If at any point you get stuck or run into problems, please don’t hesitate to ask us for help!

Software Installation Instructions

R and RStudio

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.

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.

tidyverse

`tidyverse` is a collection of packages made for R which make data analysis and visualization clear, consistent, and easy to learn. Today, we'll use functions from two of the packages in the tidyverse (`readr` and `ggplot2`), but it is worthwhile installing the entire tidyverse if you plan to continue programming in R.

Once you've installed R and RStudio, open RStudio. Look for a pane (typically in the lower left) which says "Console". Click within that pain, and type:

install.packages("tidyverse")

and hit Enter. Lots of output in the console is normal - don't worry! Don't close your computer until no more output is being printed. The `tidyverse` should then be installed. Don't hesitate to email the course instructor if you have questions concerning your install.