June 11, 2024
9:00 AM – 5:30 PM
Norfolk, VA

Preliminary Agenda

Are you sick and tired of manually manipulating data in Excel? Are you eager to level up your data science programming by learning the most widely used open-source programming language designed for data analysis and statistics? C2ER’s introductory R workshop will provide a crash course on a data science workflow in R, from cleaning and wrangling to data visualization and mapping. Instructors will cover the essentials of popular R packages, including ggplot2, tidyr, dplyr, and tidycensus. The objective of the course is to provide economic developers and labor market analysts with the basic skills they’ll need to collect and analyze relevant datasets with the efficiency and power of R.

Code will be made available to attendees before and after this hands-on-keyboard session, allowing beginner-level users to dive right in and revisit materials after training. No programming experience is required for the workshop; however, interested attendees are encouraged to explore the online book R for Data Science, which can be found at https://r4ds.had.co.nz/. The curriculum will be tailored to the C2ER and LMI Institute audience, featuring Census and BLS data, as well as easy ways to include economics and labor data in your code.

By the end of this course participants will:

• Have R, RStudio, and necessary packages installed and ready to use.
• Learn the main components of R and RStudio including scripts, the console, environments, directory, history, and R Markdown, as well as the fundamentals of effective R workflows.
• Be able to use key functions from base R and the tidyverse for data cleaning and munging with examples and hands on tutorials to start coding on your own.
• Develop a working knowledge of API packages that allow for easy retrieval of public data from sources including the Census Bureau, BLS, and BEA.
• Be able to generate frequently used plots and understand the basics of data visualization in R using the ggplot2 package.
• Gain a basic familiarity with R’s ability to work with spatial data, including mapping.

Requirements:
Attendees will need to bring their own laptop to the training class – we do not recommend iPads or tablets.

Meet the instructors:

Paul Liu Senior Program Manager Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness Click for bio	Tucker Plumlee Senior Research Associate Center for Regional Economic Competitiveness Click for bio

NOTE: This class is priced separately from the conference registration.
See here for full annual conference details.