Timing and Location

The workshop this year will be on Zoom on November 16th and 23rd from 9:30-16:30, with a one hour break for lunch. You should have received the zoom link through your email.

Requirements

The workshop will be fully hands-on. You will need to use your own computer. You will need R, RStudio, and a spreadsheet program (e.g., Excel or LibreOffice). The instructions below will guide your installation and setup of R and RStudio.

Setup Instructions

R and RStudio require separate installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE). You can think of R as the engine, and RStudio as the car. You need to install R before you install RStudio. R and RStudio should both be installed prior to attending the workshop. I have not budgeted any workshop time for assisting with installation issues and we will begin promptly at 9:30am on the first day.

Windows

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
  1. Download R from the CRAN website
  2. Run the .exe file that was just downloaded
  3. Go to the RStudio Development Page
  4. Under Installers select **RStudio x.yy.zz - Windows Vista/7/8/10) (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  5. Double click the file to install it
  6. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
If you already have R and RStudio installed
  1. Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  2. To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears in the console indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. You can check here for more information on how to remove old versions from your system if you wish to do so.

macOS

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed
  1. Download R from the CRAN website.
  2. Select the .pkg file for the latest R version
  3. Double click on the downloaded file to install R
  4. It is also a good idea to install XQuartz, which is needed by some packages
  5. Go to the RStudio download page
  6. Under Installers select macOS 10.13+ - RStudio x.yy.zzz.dmg (where x, y, and z represent version numbers)
  7. Double click the file to install RStudio
  8. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
If you already have R and RStudio installed
  1. Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  2. To check the version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears on the terminal indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it.

Linux

  1. Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.3.1.
  2. Go to the RStudio download page
  3. Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-x.yy.zzz-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  4. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

Credit

Credit for installation instructions and much of the first day of the workshop is to The Carpentries, and the Data Analysis and Visualization in R for Ecologist lesson (Contributors and Citation here)