R, RStudio, and Quarto

Author
Affiliation

Jeremy Springman

University of Pennsylvania

R and RStudio

Introductions

  • Name
  • One thing you’re interested in
  • Any past experience with R

Preparedness

You should have…

  • R + RStudio installed
  • Quarto doc rendered and sent to CT
  • GitHub account created and posted to Slack

Motivation

  • Qualtrics survey results
    • Trajectory is policy and industry
    • Little experience cleaning data
  • Academic research tools are more useful than knowing the literature
    • Dealing with messy data
    • Professional presentation
    • Reproducible work

Resources

Free, open-source textbook that teaches statistics using R

Support for R:

  • ChatGPT (OpenAI), Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google)
  • Stack Overflow

What are R and RStudio?

  • R is a programming language and free computing environment for statistical computing and graphics
  • RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides an interface by adding many convenient features and tools
  • Think of R as a car’s engine and RStudio as the dashboard
  • RStudio can also be used to manage projects, produce documents, build websites

R is a programming language and free computing environment for statistical computing and graphics. It can be runs on a wide variety of operating systems, including Linux, Windows, and MacOS. RStudio is an integrated development environment (IDE) that provides an interface by adding many convenient features and tools.

You can think of R as a car’s engine and RStudio as the dashboard. In the same way that having access to a speedometer and a navigation system makes driving much easier, using RStudio’s interface makes using R much easier as well.

R and RStudio are entirely free and updated on a regular basis, making them much more accessible and widely used than paid alternatives. You can conduct nearly any analysis using R, ranging from calculating the average of a variable to creating maps and conducting spatial analysis to conducting the analysis for an impact evaluation.

Peronalization

  • Customize the appearance of your R IDE by going to Tools -> Global Options -> Appearance

Quarto

  • Quarto integrates code into document production (R, Python, etc.)
  • Useful for producing professional .pdf or .html files, building websites
  • All assignments will require building .html files in Quarto
  • Final project will build a public website presenting an original analysis