This lesson is in the early stages of development (Alpha version)

DiscovR Workshop Curriculum: Setup

Pre-workshop setup steps

For the workshop, you will need to have a few software packages installed.

Note: If you don’t have internet access or are having trouble downloading or installing anything, let us know! We will help you troubleshoot, and if we can’t figure it out we will have USB drives at the workshop for you to use to get the required programs onto your computer.

If you have internet access:

  1. Install the following software (all instructions are below).
    • R
    • RStudio, an integrated development environment for R
  2. After you have installed everything above, download un-report.zip. You’ll need the files included during the workshop.
    1. Move un-report.zip to your Desktop and unzip it (usually double-clicking it will work).
    2. Start up RStudio. In the upper left menu, select File > Open. In the window that opens, go to the un-report/ 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). Note that there will be some red text that prints out to the screen. This doesn’t necessarily mean you got an error unless it says Error somewhere!
    4. Take a screenshot of the console output (or copy & paste it) into an email and send it to the lead instructor. If there were issues, they’ll help you get everything setup correctly.

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

Software Installation Instructions

R

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.

Video Tutorial

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.