R Community and Free Resources

# R Community and Free Resources
### Heather Turner Forwards Taskforce for Women and Underrepresented Groups
### 14 March 2020 <img src="forwards_296x296.png" alt="Forwards logo" width="100" style="padding-right:50px"> <img src="africar.png" alt="AfricaR logo" width="100" style="padding-right:50px"> <img src="whyr.png" alt="WhyR? logo" width="100"> <a href="https://heatherturner.net/talks/r-community">heatherturner.net/talks/r-community</a> <a href="https://twitter.com/heathrturnr">HeathrTurnr</a>

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# R Community

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# AfricaR

>  Our mission is to achieve improved representation by encouraging, inspiring,
and empowering the African population of all genders who are underrepresented
in the global R community.

.pull-right-64[
So far:
- Connect R Users from different regions
- Established several R User Groups
- Organized 2 satRday conferences

Follow on Twitter [@AfricaRUsers](https://twitter.com/AfricaRUsers).
]

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# Leadership Team

Leadership team expanded for 2020

.pull-left[
- **Shelmith Kariuki - Kenya**
- **Denis Irorere - Nigeria**
- Mohammed Ali - Egypt
- Ahmadou Dicko - Senegal
- Anicet Ebou - Ivory Coast
- Nelda - Uganda
- Vebashini Naidoo - South Africa
]

.pull-right[
![Map of Africa, showing home countries of AfricaR leadership](africar_leadership_with_logo.png)
]

???

representatives from Egypt, Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya and South Africa

---

# Plans for 2020

- Write governing documents (mission statement, CoC)
 - Rotating curator Twitter account
 - Tutorials in French
 - Website (events calendar, blog)
 - Package(s) to address African needs, e.g. NLP library that supports Arabic,
 Swahili, etc.

---

# Forwards

R Foundation taskforce to widen participation of underepresented groups

- Social media
   - Twitter: @R_Forwards
   - Blog: https://forwards.github.io/blog/
 - Community
 - Conferences
 - On-ramps
 - Surveys
 - Teaching

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# Why R? Foundation

Initiated to support Why R? Conference in Poland

Money raised also supports
 - pre-meetings in Europe
 - support grant for women in data science

Extending support to other regions including Africa

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# R Foundation and R Consortium

The R Foundation is a not-for-profit organization to support R.
 - Provides financial support to CRAN, R Core and R Foundation members
 - Publishes The R Journal
 - Oversees the useR! conference series

The R Consortium is a group of business that support R.
 - Provide financial support to R User Groups and Conferences
 - Funds coding and community projects

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# R User Groups

In Africa: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Eswatini,
South Africa - new group starting in Botswana!

Typical meetups
- Talks, e.g.
- Tutorial, e.g. [Importing data into R](https://www.meetup.com/Bauchi-R-User-Group-BauchiRUG/events/254472581/),
 [ggplot2 for data visualisation](https://www.meetup.com/Abidjan-R-users-Meetup/events/264563481/)

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# R User Groups

Other types of meetup
- Remote talk [Dar es Salaam User Group](https://twitter.com/iamreddave/status/1139923218217799686?s=20)
- Watch party [rstudio::conf](https://www.meetup.com/LagosRUsers/events/267900212/) (live)
- Videos e.g. from [useR! conference](https://www.meetup.com/R-User-Group-Rhein-Neckar/events/245919611/)
- Work through book e.g. [R for Data Science](https://www.meetup.com/Joburg-R-Users-Group/events/269296647/)
- [Tidy Tuesday Workshop](https://www.meetup.com/Cardiff-R-User-Group/events/269231773/)
- Hackathon e.g. [Open Data Day](https://zurich-r-user-group.github.io/hackathon.html) or [Zindi machine learning challenge](https://twitter.com/proggieug/status/1148182225227325440?s=20)
- Informal meetup to help each other [lunchR](https://www.meetup.com/portland-r-user-group/events/268122016/) or [TalkRs](https://www.meetup.com/Cardiff-R-User-Group/events/266632566/)

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# R-Ladies

> R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender
diversity in the R community.

- Meetup groups: Benin, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa
- R-Ladies Remote ([@RLadiesRemote](https://twitter.com/rladiesremote))
    - reading group (~1/month): Next up, [Agile Data Science with R](https://github.com/EdwinTh/ADSwR)
    - coffee chat (~1/month): guided 1 hour chat about R topics
- [Abstract review for conferences](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSck8FBjNWjziI8pPIoCBlf5J4oQ_6pzeUdbQ1HjYfJ2bNDwDw/viewform)
- R-Ladies community slack [sign up](https://rladies-community-slack.herokuapp.com/)
 - many channels: where in the world, events, r-help

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# R4DS Online Learning Community

https://www.rfordatasci.com/

Originally to work through R 4 Data Science, now a general learning community.

Join Slack to get help as you learn.

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# Tidy Tuesday

https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday

Practice your R skills on a new data set (designed for beginners)
 - New data set released each week (Monday)
 - Practice data wrangling and data visualisation
 - Get help on R4DS or R-Ladies community slack

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# RStudio Community

https://community.rstudio.com/

Online discussion forum (sign-up but no installation required)

Discussion topics
 - (tidyverse) packages: dplyr, ggplot2
 - R markdown
 - RStudio IDE
 - Machine Learning and Modelling

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# Stackoverflow

https://stackoverflow.com/

Q&A site for programming questions.

R questions shold be tagged with [r] plus relevant package/topic tags.

Questions must have a reproducible example (reprex), the **reprex** R package
helps with this.

Best to search for answers to begin with.

See the tour for more information: https://stackoverflow.com/tour.

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# Twitter

It is so useful there is a book about it! [t4rstats.com](www.t4rstats.com). The main hashtag is #rstats.

Accounts to follow
 - [@botswana_r](https://twitter.com/botswana_r)
 - [@EswatiniUseR](https://twitter.com/EswatiniUseR)
 - [@AfricaRUsers](https://twitter.com/AfricaRUsers)
 - [@R_Forwards](https://twitter.com/R_Forwards)
 - [@RLadiesGlobal](https://twitter.com/RLadiesGlobal)
 - [@_R_Foundation](https://twitter.com/_R_Foundation)
 - [@RConsortium](https://twitter.com/RConsortium)
 - [@WeAreRLadies](https://twitter.com/WeAreRLadies)

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# Other

- Facebook: used by some user groups
- LinkedIn: main group: "The R Project for Statistical Computing"

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# Conferences

Johannesburg satRday (https://joburg2020.satrdays.org/)
 - tutorials and talks

Various international conferences have diversity scholarships:
 - useR! (https://www.r-project.org/conferences/)
 - rstudio::conf (https://rstudio.com/conference/)

Forwards [tips on applying for scholarships ](https://github.com/forwards/conferences/blob/0fa6412e1d1629dc9957959dbd51490b861e7b88/diversity_scholarships.md)

List of R conferences: https://jumpingrivers.github.io/meetingsR/events.html.

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# Free Resources

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# Conference videos/material

Many R conferences put talk videos and tutorial material online

useR! 2019
 - talks: [useR! 2019 Toulouse Talks on YouTube](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4IzsxWztPdliwImi5JLBC4BrvqxG-vcA)
 - tutorials: https://www.user2019.fr/tutorials/

rstudio::conf
 - talks: https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2020
 - tutorials: https://github.com/rstudio-conf-2020

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# More conference videos/material

satRday_zaf
 - talks: [Joburg 2019](https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-HLbsCyJ3sDTwq5BgB8T_A)

Ihaka lecture series
 - https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/science/about-the-faculty/department-of-statistics/ihaka-lecture-series.html

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# Blogs

Many useful blog posts on new and existing packages, how to do X in R

- R-bloggers (https://www.r-bloggers.com/): use RSS reader like feedly, inoreader
- RWeekly (https://rweekly.org/): can get RSS feed/follow on Twitter
- rladies-blogs channel on R-Ladies Community Slack

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# Podcasts

Sina Rüeger highlights several R/data science podcasts

https://sinarueeger.github.io/post/podcasts/

She links to this list: https://jumpingrivers.github.io/podcasts/technical-podcasts.html

There is also the Women in Data Science podcast

https://www.widsconference.org/podcast.html

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# Online books

Books created with the **bookdown** package: https://bookdown.org/. In particular
 - R for Data Science
 - R Graphics Cookbook
 - Fundamentals of Data Visualization

Some (all?) Manning books can be read online for free, e.g.
 - [Build a career in data science](https://www.manning.com/books/build-a-career-in-data-science?a_aid=buildcareer&a_bid=76784b6a)
 - [Practical Data Science with R](https://www.manning.com/books/practical-data-science-with-r-second-edition?query=r)

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# More online books

Several R books on leanpub can be bought for a price you choose, from free
 - [Introduction to Data Science](https://leanpub.com/datasciencebook)
 - [Exploratory Data Analysis with R](https://leanpub.com/exdata)

Other
 - [Modern Statistics for Modern Biology](http://web.stanford.edu/class/bios221/book/)
 - [ggplot2](https://ggplot2-book.org/)

???

Converting to PDF: https://community.rstudio.com/t/bookdown-books-on-the-web-downloading-and-converting-to-pdf/30268/3

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# Workshop materials

- The R-Ladies groups share their material online and you can search for
material via this great shiny app: https://yabellini.shinyapps.io/RLadiesLesson/
- Coding Club (a group at the University of Edinburgh) have developed many tutorials: https://ourcodingclub.github.io/ on data handling, visualisation, modelling and spatial data.
- Free interactive tutorials, including the R Bootcamp (https://github.com/flor14/tutorials).
- List of materials: https://github.com/Chris-Engelhardt/data_sci_guide, often free if don't want certificate.
- R Studio education page: resources for beginners/intermediate/advanced (https://education.rstudio.com/learn/)
- Swirl, learn R in R (https://swirlstats.com/)

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# Courses

- Chromebook Data Science course (https://jhudatascience.org/chromebookdatascience) covering the fundamentals of data science, materials on leanpub from free.
- Data Science in a Box: https://datasciencebox.org/
- eR-Biostat R/statistics courses (https://er-biostat.github.io/Courses/)

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# Special Topics

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# Handling Non-tidy Excel Data

- [How to Clean Messy Data in R](https://rfortherestofus.com/2019/12/how-to-clean-messy-data-in-r/), blogpost by David Keyes, with useful links
- [Spreadsheet Munging Strategies](https://nacnudus.github.io/spreadsheet-munging-strategies/index.html), ebook by Duncan Garmonsway author of **unpivotr** package, whose [README](https://github.com/nacnudus/unpivotr) links to other resources e.g. screencasts, worked examples
- [Tidying/reshaping tables using tidyr](https://mgimond.github.io/ES218/Week03b.html) and [Joining Data Tables](https://mgimond.github.io/ES218/Week03c.html) modules from the Colby College "Exploratory Data Analysis in R" course.

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# Missing Data in R

- [R-miss-tastic website](https://rmisstastic.netlify.com/): workflows, lectures, workshops, packages, papers

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# Big Data

- Three Strategies for Working with Big Data in R, [blog post by Alex Gold](https://rviews.rstudio.com/2019/07/17/3-big-data-strategies-for-r/)
- Working with Big Data in R, [webinar](https://rstudio.com/resources/webinars/working-with-big-data-in-r/), using dplyr with data stores
- Big Data with R, [workshop](https://github.com/rstudio/bigdataclass) that covers how to use R to interact databases and Spark
- CRAN task view on [High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R](https://cran.r-project.org/web/views/HighPerformanceComputing.html), listing relevant packages like **bigmemory**, **bigstatsr**
- Tutorial on [**trelliscope**](http://deltarho.org/docs-trelliscope/) for visualising big data

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# Machine Learning

Workshops:
 - [Introduction to Machine Learning with R](https://shirinsplayground.netlify.com/2018/06/intro_to_ml_workshop_heidelberg/)
 - [Introduction to Machine Learning with the Tidyverse](https://github.com/rstudio-conf-2020/intro-to-ml-tidy) (rstudio::conf 2020)

Online book: [An Introduction to Machine Learning with R](https://lgatto.github.io/IntroMachineLearningWithR/index.html)

Interactive tutorial: [Supervised machine learning case studies in R](https://supervised-ml-course.netlify.com/)

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# Social Media Analytics

- Follow Me: Introduction to social media analysis in R, video of useR! 2018 tutorial by Maria Prokofieva, Saskia Freytag and Anna Quaglieri: [Part I](https://youtu.be/ped2DVtGipY?list=PL4IzsxWztPdnyAKQQLxA4ucpaCLdsKvZw), [Part II](https://youtu.be/DvQEHhP6pVo)
- Introduction to using Twitter Social media data in R, [online lessons by Earth Lab](https://www.earthdatascience.org/courses/earth-analytics/get-data-using-apis/intro-to-social-media-text-mining-r/)
- Text Mining [tutorial](https://github.com/juliasilge/deming2018) by Julia Silge and [e-book](https://www.tidytextmining.com/) by Julia Silge and David Robinson
- Social Network Analysis, [tutorial by SocialMediaLab](https://rstudio-pubs-static.s3.amazonaws.com/314360_89d38ce0b72c4caa977fe2bfb0310972.html)
- Social Network Analysis in R, [short introduction by Wildon Tucker](https://rpubs.com/wctucker/302110)

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# Infographics

Some blog posts
 - https://www.listendata.com/2019/06/create-infographics-with-r.html
 - http://nandeshwar.info/data-visualization/how-to-create-infographics-in-r/

Infographiq package: https://marinebon.org/infographiq/

BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics: https://bbc.github.io/rcookbook/

R for Data Journalism, tutorials for publication quality graphics: https://rddj.info/#publication-quality-graphics