This hands-on beginner series covers the fundamentals needed for using R and RStudio on the Digital Research Alliance of Canada’s high-performance computing (HPC) clusters. R allows you to analyze data in a reproducible, script-based way, so you and others can efficiently rerun and check your work. It’s powerful for importing, cleaning, analyzing, and visualizing data of any size, and is free, open-source, and widely used in research workflows.

The first session introduces the Unix shell, a powerful tool for automating tasks and building HPC-based workflows. In the second session, participants will learn the basics of coding in R, and will become familiar with using RStudio. This includes creating objects, importing and working with data, using the basic libraries, and performing simple operations. In the final session, we will log into a cluster, load R and download some packages, and then use RStudio to do some model testing and visualization. Afterwards, we will submit our full script as a batch job to the cluster. 

While the examples and data used will be aimed at the Humanities and Social Sciences community, the session is open to anyone and everyone interested in learning about R.