On Tuesday I gave a workshop at the Data Journalism UK conference, run by Paul Bradshaw.
This was the worked example for absolute beginners that we went through.
If you’ve never looked at R before and want to run some R code, load up this page , copy the following in step by step and hit ‘Run’:
#1. Print Hello world to the console
print("Hello, world!")
#2. Do some maths
2+2
4*5
(4+5) / 3
#3. Set some variables
var <- "My variable!"
var
my_name <- "Nicholas"
my_number <- 2
second_number <- 5
product <- my_number * second_number
product
#4. take a look at a data frame
mtcars
str(mtcars)
rownames(mtcars)
mtcars$cyl
mtcars[1,]
mtcars[1,5]
#5. perform some functions
#a) create a data frame of 100 random numbers
our_df <- data.frame(runif(n = 100))
#b) name the rows
colnames(our_df) <- "number"
#c) round the numbers
our_df$number <- round(our_df$number,2)
#d find the average of the numbers
mean(our_df$number)
#6. plot a graph of the numbers
#install the package if you haven't already
install.packages("ggplot2")
library(ggplot2)
p <- ggplot(data = our_df, aes(x = number, y = number)) + geom_point()
p
p2<- ggplot(data = our_df, aes(x = number, y = runif(n = 100))) + geom_point() + ggtitle("100 random numbers")
p2
p3 <- ggplot(data = our_df, aes(x = number, y = runif(n = 100), color = runif(n = 100))) + geom_point() + ggtitle("100 random numbers")
p3
There were presentations from various people in data journalism in Britain, which you can take a look at here.