May 28: combination plots or workflow with git?

[Bill Evans]

Welcome back! Oh, wait, I’m the one who has been incommunicado …

Most (MIIS and CSUMB) will be complete with class-related timelines, so I’m hoping that May 28 will be a reasonable date for most. I hope students who came to previous meetings will be sticking around over the summer, so they can attend as well (after de-stressing after finals).

There are two topics that struck some chords in the last two meetings, plus a third that has been requested a few times since we talked about it last time:

1. Combination plots, similar to but distinct from “faceting” (which is done well with lattice and ggplot2). I can highlight different techniques using par(mfrow), layout(), and par(fig).
2. Project workflow using Git (or some form of version control). I use git on a regular basis, so I can talk through considerations of version control for single users and for multi-user collaborations. One good thing is that, like many other things, there are so many techniques that they bring with them various levels of “goodness-of-fit” with regards to how well they work for the user. The bottom line is that it takes perseverance to incorporate it into your habit patterns, after which you can benefit from the fruits of your labor.
3. R Markdown. Included in topics including reproducible reporting, easy report generation, and report templating, R Markdown is both easy to use (with a little learning curve) and has a fairly robust integration with R(Studio). I can talk about some of the basics of R Markdown, and touch on creating templates for easy standardization.

Please, let me know which of these makes sense to you, and/or another topic that would blow these out of the water!

If you really don’t care (and perhaps will come), please let me know anyway so I can feel like I’m not talking to an empty auditorium …

Hope to see you in a few weeks.

~ bill

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[Bill Evans]

No meeting tonight, it's been rescheduled to June 4.