Online Data Carpentry Workshop

University of Western Cape, sponsored by SADiLaR, South Africa

12 April - 16 April, 2021

8:30 am - 13:00 pm

Instructors: Benson Muite, Oghenere Salubi, Kudakwashe Madzima, Sarah Schäfer

Helpers: Freddy Izingizwe, Ibrahim Ahmed, Tauriq Salie

General Information

Data Carpentry develops and teaches workshops on the fundamental data skills needed to conduct research. Its target audience is researchers who have little to no prior computational experience, and its lessons are domain specific, building on learners' existing knowledge to enable them to quickly apply skills learned to their own research. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.

For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Good Enough Practices for Scientific Computing".

Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.

Where: This is an online event. We will meet using the online videoconference software Zoom. You will need to download and install their client to connect with your instructors. The link to use for this event is https://carpentries.zoom.us/my/carpentriesroom3. If needed, the password is **202020**.

When: 12 April - 16 April, 2021. Add to your Google Calendar.

Requirements: Be a postgraduate student in the Humanities and Social Sciences. Participants must have access to a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. Some sponsorship is available to access mobile data - please contact the organisers for more information. They should have a few specific software packages installed. Since this is an online workshop, participants need to have access to internet (listed below).

Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible as far as possible. Please make sure that you have the following:

Materials will be provided in advance of the workshop and you will be able to ask the organisers for extra materials if needed in advance. If we can help making learning easier for you.

Contact: Please email sschafer@uwc.ac.za for more information.


Code of Conduct

Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct.This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.


Collaborative Notes

We will use this collaborative document for chatting, taking notes, and sharing URLs and bits of code.


Surveys

Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.

Pre-workshop Survey

Post-workshop Survey


Schedule


Syllabus


Setup

To participate in a Data Carpentry workshop, you will need access to the software described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.

We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.

The setup instructions for the Data Carpentry Social Sciences workshops (with R) can be found at the workshop overview site.

Additional R setup information is below.

1: R and RStudio

For this version we recommend at least R version 4.0 or later and RStudio 1.2

Windows

If you already have R and RStudio installed

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed

macOS

If you already have R and RStudio installed

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed

Linux

Follow the instructions for your distribution

from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.2.

2: Install the Tidyverse

RStudio 'install packages' screen.

3: Test your installation

RStudio screen after running test script.