Data Journalism: Investigating Data with R 1-2. Hands-on. [B+I]

Hands-on. Beginner [B]-Intermediate [I].

Sooner or later you know you’ll come up against a dataset so big it’s going to crash Excel if you even try to open it. Maybe your questions are becoming too complex for Excel’s built-in analytics tools to handle. Maybe you find yourself frequently updating a dataset or running the same calculations for your reporting. Or you just want to automate some of the collection or visualisation of a dataset.

If these are the problems you face, then R is your friend! And here’s your chance to get to know it better.

By the end of these sessions you will have learned the basics of using R and its most popular interface RStudio. You will know how to explore your data and run common analysis tasks.

These sessions can be taken as a whole course, but can also be taken as individual modules.

You do not need to have any prior coding or data experience to take this course. Documentation will be provided to help you continue your learning after the conference.

Investigating Data with R – 1: First Steps [B]
You’ve heard of R as a tool for data analysis, you may even have tried it and found it too difficult. In this session we will get you over the hump of getting started, writing code to do in a few words things which you would need lots of instructions to do with Excel or Googlesheets. You will begin to understand what your code is doing, and how to use key functions to ask your data journalistic questions.
R sessions will be done using a cloud version of R – no installation necessary.

Investigating Data with R – 2: Getting help from AI [B+I]
In the last 12 months, AI tools to help you write and execute R code have become more and more user-friendly. In this session we will demonstrate the various options for getting help from AI, and try to show you how much R you need to know in order to get the best out of the LLM. (The cloud-based R has not yet integrated AI tools into it, so when it comes to the hands-on element of asking AI to write code we will be using a browser-based LLM, Claude.Code – but it will show you what can be done, and what the limitations are).