Data Journalism: Investigating Data with R. Hands-On. I

So you’ve got the fundamentals of data journalism down. You’re interrogating spreadsheets like a pro and able to use pivot tables like the data Swiss-army-knives they are.

But 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. Or 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 you keep having to do.

Then R is your friend!

Our data trainers showcase the potential of R and the stories it helped investigating.

This course is for intermediate level of data journalism.

By the end of these three 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 do the common analysis tasks.

The three sessions are organised as follows –
1 – introduction to R, the RStudio interface, the Tidyverse, importing data and taking your first look at the data you’ve imported
2 – exploring your data, reshaping it, analysing it
3 – visualising your data using the most popular R package ggplot2.

These sessions will make use of a cloud version of R and RStudio so there’s no need to bring anything other than a laptop capable of accessing the internet. At the end you will be able to access your R files and packages for a couple of months, allowing you time to decide to install R and RStudio on your own computer if you want to.