These are the pages for a workshop for the Brown University Digital Archaeology Lab. In this workshop we will do a series of hand-on coding activities to set up and use a research compendium suitable for writing reproducible journal articles and reports using R and R Markdown. We will use the rrtools package, and additional documentation about the functions used in this workshop can be found in that package.
We will take you on a tour of using R and related tools to create a research compendium. You’ll learn:
- Organising a project as an R package
- The basics of R Markdown
- Writing a research paper with R Markdown
The slides used in the workshop can be viewed online here
Who is this for?
This workshop will be useful for archaeologists who:
- Write empirical journal articles
- Write empirical reports for CRM
- Teach archaeological science topics at undergraduate or graduate levels
The target audience for this workshop are archaeologists who work with any kind of numbers (artefact counts, measurements, locations, etc.), who want to make their work more efficient, reproducible and transparent.
How to prepare
This will be hands-on activity, you will need laptop and power supply so you can charge the battery during the day.
You will need a GitHub account. You can create a free account for yourself on http://github.com, this is useful for working with the Git version control system
We will be doing the workshop activities using R and RStudio in our web browser, at https://rstudio.cloud/project/493309. Click that link and log in using your GitHub account.
If you want to continue working with R and RStudio after the workshop, you’ll need to download and install onto your laptop these three free programs (accepting all default options during installation.
Even if you have previously installed these in the past, please update them.
- The R programming language: for Windows or OSX
- The RStudio integrated development environment (to make R easier and more pleasant to use)
- The Git version control software
If you have any questions before the workshop, please send an email to me at bmarwick@uw.edu