R Working Group

Grant Drawve (from Soci-Crim) and I are developing an informal R users group here at University of Arkansas for faculty/staff/students, really anyone who would be interested. We are planning to make it accessible to everyone regardless of levels of experience and it will always be free for everyone to join. We see this as being a learning/tips/questions-answers type of group since many of us have an interest in R or are currently utilizing R in some capacity. We see the group meeting on and off campus, depending on the group size and day/time. We are planning to start with an email list for everyone who is interested and then plan on topics/tutorials depending on interests and research areas. 
If there are any questions, please feel free to reach out to me (jd033@uark.edu) or Grant (drawve@uark.edu). If you would be interested in joining the group, email us. We will get you added to a group list.
 

How to Get R / R-Studio 

If you have not used R before, you need to install R in your laptop (or the computing resource you use). It is available (free) from http://cran.r-project.org/. The software R comes with its own GUI (graphic user interface), where you can write your code and see the results. There is also a very nice interface called R-Studio (more compact, and easy to use), the basic version of R-studio is free and can be downloaded from https://www.rstudio.com/.

There are many books for teaching the basics of R, also lots of resources on the internet. 

  1. ATS UCLA R Page: http://statistics.ats.ucla.edu/stat/r/ (This is a great resource by itself, and points to a lot of other useful resources too!)
  2. Quick R: http://www.statmethods.net/
  3. R-Bloggers: https://www.r-bloggers.com/ 
  4. R for data-science: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/index.html.
Personally, I have been using/teaching R for the better part of the last decade and have seen it grow from a statisticians’ tool to a massive open source movement across disciplines and we believe it’ll be hugely beneficial for our campus to have a group where people with similar interests can meet and interact.