Using RStudio with GitHub for Securing Your Work, Versioning, and Collaboration

RStudio and GitHub go together like two wheels of a bicycle. Together, they form a low-overhead yet powerful open source workbench – a lean machine that can help take your data to far places.

In a recent informal evaluation of coral reef related research articles that included simultaneous publication of code and data, by far the most popular language used was R, and RStudio is the most popular interface for working with R.

In a CRESCYNT Data Science for Coral Reefs: Data Integration and Team Science workshop held earlier this year at NCEAS, the most powerful skill introduced was using RStudio with GitHub: writing data and code to GitHub from RStudio.

Once the link is set up, the work can continue in RStudio in the way people may be familiar with, and then one can make commits to GitHub periodically to save the work and potentially pave the way for collaboration.

1. Download and install R
2. Download and install R Studio
3. Create a GitHub account
4. Connect a repository in the GitHub account to RStudio.  This takes multiple steps; here are some good options to work through the process.

You can use sections of NCEAS’s long tutorial on Introduction to Open Data Science, initially developed by their Ocean Health Index group. Use the sections on overview of R and RStudio, Markdown, intro to GitHub, and skip down to collaboration in GitHub.

There are a number of other tutorials available to show how to make and use these softwares together; a beautifully clean and clear step-by-step tutorial is from Resources at GitHub; another excellent one is from Support at RStudio.

Also available to you: Hadley Wickham on Git and GitHub, a Study Group’s Version Control with RStudio and GitHub Simply Explained, R Class’s An Introduction to Git and How to Use it with RStudio, and U Chicago’s Using Git within RStudio, and Happy Git’s Connect RStudio to Git and GitHub. You may prefer the style of one of these over others.

If later you want to go further, come back for these tutorials hosted at R-Bloggers: R Blogdown Setup in GitHub, and Migrating from GitHub to GitLab with RStudio. And good news – you can now archive a snapshot of a GitHub repository to preserve and even publish a particular version of your RStudio work – plus get a doi to share – at Zenodo.

Summary:  Many research scientists use RStudio as their primary analytical and visualization tool. RStudio now has the ability to connect to a GitHub repository and make commits to it from RStudio. This permits critical core functions for a simplified workbench: documenting workflows (R Markdown), preserving code and provenance, producing repeatable results, creating flexible pipelines, sharing data and code, and allowing collaboration among members of a team. Versioning and teamwork is simplified by making commits frequently and always doing fresh pulldowns prior to commit (rather than focusing on branch development). The process is valuable for individual researchers, documenting project work, and collaborating in teams.

Related blogposts: Learning to Love R More and R Resources for Graphing and Visualization.

>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<

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CRESCYNT Data Science for Coral Reefs – Workshop Materials

Thanks to Jan Vincente and Ingrid Knapp for this pair of Data Rescue images.

Written while embedded in our CRESCYNT Data Science for Coral Reefs workshops. Amazingly, everyone who participated in workshop 1 – Data Science for Coral Reefs: Data Rescue – learned even more than they thought they would. We’ve had wonderful NCEAS trainers, spectacular participants with amazing datasets, and a lot of hard work over 4 days (March 7-10, 2018).

UPDATE: Here is the Data Rescue workshop agenda we used, with links to all of the training slides.

In the second intensive workshop – Data Science for Coral Reefs: Data Integration and Team Science – people will be introduced to R Studio and GitHub if they have not used them before, and then we will work on exploring techniques for integrating disparate datasets. We’ll start with a pair of datasets at a time, and efforts may involve extracting data from one dataset based on observations from another; upscaling, downscaling, resampling, or summarizing to make intervals and scales mesh – exactly the kind of process that coral reef researchers have said is a recurring challenge in asking bigger science questions.

UPDATE: Here is the Data Integration and Team Science workshop agenda we used, with links to all of those training slides and exercises.

Each workshop group is writing a paper to summarize and share lessons learned, so please stay tuned for those!

We experimented with an unusual process for these workshops: two days of training followed by two days of workathon. We’re liking it! Tell us what you think about these topics and training materials. What other workshop outputs would you like to see?

>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<

 

CRESCYNT Data Science For Coral Reefs Workshop 2 – Data Integration and Team Science

We’re extremely pleased to be able to offer two workshops in March 2018 at NCEAS. The second is CRESCYNT Data Science for Coral Reefs Workshop 2: Data Modeling, Data Integration and Team Science. Apply here.

When: March 12-15, 2018
Where: NCEAS, Santa Barbara, CA

Workshop description:

This workshop is recommended for early to mid-career and senior scientists with interest in applying technical skills to collaborative research questions and committed to subsequently sharing what they learn. Participants will learn how to structure and combine heterogeneous data sets relevant to coral reef scientists in a collaborative way. Topics covered on days 1 and 2 of the workshop will cover reproducible workflows using R/RStudio and RMarkdown, collaborative coding with GitHub, strategies for team research, data modeling and data wrangling, and advanced data integration and visualization tools. Participants will also spend 2 days working in small teams to integrate various coral reef datasets to practice the skills learned and develop workflows for data tidying and integration.

The workshop is limited to 20 participants. We encourage you to apply via this form. Workshop costs will be covered with support from NSF EarthCube – CRESCYNT RCN. We anticipate widely sharing workshop outcomes, including workflows and recommendations. Anticipate some significant pre-workshop prep effort.

Related posts: Learning to Love R More and R Resources for Visualization

UPDATE: HERE IS THE AGENDA FOR THE WORKSHOP, WITH TRAINING LINKS.

>>>Go to the blog Masterpost or the CRESCYNT website or NSF EarthCube.<<<

CRESCYNT Toolbox – R Resources for Graphing and Visualization

In a previous post we offered some solid supportive resources for learning R – a healthy  dinner with lots of great vegetables. Here we offer a dessert cart of rich resources for data visualization and graphing. It’s a powerful motivation for using R.

First up is The New R Graph Gallery – extensive, useful, and actually new. “It contains more than 200 data visualizations categorized by type, along with the R code that created them. You can browse the gallery by types of chart (boxplots, maps, histograms, interactive charts, 3-D charts, etc), or search the chart descriptions. Once you’ve found a chart you like, you can admire it in the gallery (and interact with it, if possible), and also find the R code which you can adapt for your own use. Some entries even include mini-tutorials describing how the chart was made.” (Description by Revolutions.)

Sometimes we want (or need) plain vanilla – something clean and elegant rather than extravagant. Check out A Compendium of Clean Graphs in R, including code. Many examples are especially well-suited for the spartan challenge of conveying information in grayscale. The R Graph Catalog is a similar resource.

If you’re just getting started with R, take a look at the Painless Data Visualization section (p. 17 onward) in this downloadable Beginner’s Guide.

In R, ggplot2,  based on the Grammar of Graphics, is perhaps the single most popular R package for data visualization. The R Cookbook‘s section on Graphs using ggplot2 is a helpful precursor to the R Graphics Cookbook. DataCamp’s DataVis with ggplot2 has a free segment of intro lessons.

For more on visualization and other capabilities, check out this recommended list of useful R packages in the R Studio support blog – succinct and terrific.

If you’re already skilled in R and want a new challenge, an indirect method of harnessing some of the power of D3.js for interactive web visualizations is available through plotly for R. Here’s getting started with plotly and ggplot2, plotly and Shiny, and a gallery. The resources offer code and in some cases the chance to open a visualization and modify its data.

Have a favorite resource? Please share as a comment, or email us!

CRESCYNT Toolbox – Learning to Love R More (or R is for Reproducible)

We are driven to learn like sharks: constantly take in new flows, or die. In a recent workshop, when coral reef scientists were asked: “How many of you use R?” 60% raised a hand. To: “How many of you are comfortable with and love using R?” only about 15% kept a hand up.

Here’s where to go to learn to love R more.

You likely already know of the R Project, free and open source software for statistical computing and graphics. You may already know of the reliability of the Comprehensive R Archive Network or CRAN repository, favored by many over other potential sources of community-generated code because of their metadata and testing requirements; it now hosts over 9,300 packages (sorted by date and name).

You may also know the elegance of RStudio, the excitement of putting your own interactive code online in RStudio’s Shiny, some great cheat sheets, the most popular R packages, and Stack Overflow as a great place to find answers to your R questions.

You may not know of the new R course finder, an online directory you can search and filter to find the best online R course for your next step (note there are often free versions or segments of even the pay courses listed). There are YouTube videos for R learning, like  twotorials (two-minute tutorials) and YaRrr! (because pirates) with book.

A very recent new book is getting rave reviews from both statistics and programming viewpoints: The Book of R by Tilman Davies (preview it here). The author writes:

“The Book of R …represents the introduction to the language that I wish I’d had when I began exploring R, combined with the first-year fundamentals of statistics as a discipline, implemented in R….   Try not to be afraid of R. It will do exactly what you tell it to – nothing more, nothing less. When something doesn’t work as expected or an error occurs, this literal behavior works in your favor….   Especially in your early stages of learning…try to use R for everything, even for very simple tasks or calculations you might usually do elsewhere. This will force your mind to switch to ‘R mode’ more often, and it’ll get you comfortable with the environment quickly.”

Because R is such a  stellar example of free and open source software with a very robust community (e.g., great stuff at r-bloggers), it’s a surprise how lucky we are that it IS open source, as heard in this interview with R founder Hadley Wickham on the DataStori.es podcast.

We’ll soon host a guest blogpost on some exploratory coral symbiont data analyses, visualizations, and comments generated in R Markdown, which is RStudio’s method for preserving code and output in one running web document. The work is beautiful and useful, and highlights the use of an electronic notebook as a way to capture and share data exploration, analysis and visualization, and to tell a data story. (A major advance to that software was announced this week in the form of R Notebook, which will ship within the next couple of months.)

Why is it worth learning to love R more?

R helps make sure your data work is reproducible (such an issue for science), repeatable (valuable for any processing you have to do periodically), and reusable (on other datasets or data versions, or by colleagues or your future self).

A couple of high-level languages, like R and Python, are becoming more popular each year, and are finding their way as general purpose tools into analytical platforms. These will serve as primary sources of flexibility in cyberinfrastructure platforms now available or under development. Our future selves thank us for the learning investment.

R, Python Duel As Top Analytics, Data Science software – KDnuggets 2016 Software Poll Results  (click graph)

Update: speaking of interviews with R makers, here’s an October 2016 interview with JJ Allaire, the creator of RStudio, Shiny, and R Markdown. His advice for people new to R:

I would suggest that they get a copy of the R for Data Science book written by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund…. Also, when you have questions or run into problems don’t give up. There’s a lot of great activity around R on stackoverflow and other places and there’s an excellent chance you’re going to find the answers to your questions if you look carefully for them.

Further Update: In January 2018, Kaggle released resources for Hands-On Data Science learning, including lessons for R in data setup, data visualization, and machine learning.