Our very own Brian Conner (who is great) has offered to provide a high speed introduction to R, a free software environment for statistical computing and data visualization. From installation to data manipulation to plots and maps in one hour.
We’ll be holding it at the San Diego Foundation (map) at 6:30pm on April 20th.
Here’s what you can expect:
15 min:
- What is R for? Outline a basic process of data analysis
- Installation & Packages
- Basic R Syntax (math, variables, loops, conditional logic, getting help, etc)
- Vectors (the most basic R data structure) and functions
15 min:
- Loading data
- More Data Structures (Data Frames, Factors)
- Manipulating & Exploring Loaded Data
25 min:
- Graphing & exploring data with ggplot2 (and some other packages)
- Writing a function (if time allows)
- Plotting data on a map (if time allows)
Hopefully we’ll have time for questions too!
Important! This class is designed to be suitable for programmers and non-programmers (excel-level users) alike. It’s easier for us to accomplish our goal of making data available for people to use if we can help more people use data! Please don’t be intimidated and come on out!
Recommended materials and links on GitHub.
Our friends at New Media Rights are organizing Drumbeat San Diego, which they describe as a “new kind of gathering of technologists, artists, filmmakers, attorneys, community organizers, and creators of all types.”
Drumbeat is happening on February 5th, 2011 at Queen Bee’s Art & Cultural Center in North Park. Register for the event. It’s free, although you can donate if you want.
We’re excited to be participating in Drumbeat along with our friends from the Watchdog Institute. We’ll be there examining data gathered by the Watchdog Institute from over 35,000 911 calls from July of 2010.
We’re still working on the curriculum for our session, but expect the following:
- Insights into how journalists get access to data, and how you can too.
- A workshop on how to develop a meaningful and useful data visualization.
- A discussion on the best ways to make data more available and useful to people.
In anticipation of the event, we invite you to download the data and play with it. Click here to download a .zip including the 911 data in a .csv and a text file describing what the data mean.
Please, by all means, go nuts. Do whatever you want with the data. Think about practical questions that the data can answer and try to answer those questions. Tweet us about it or email us about it. Hopefully, we’ll see you at Drumbeat and you can tell us about what you came up with.
Please let us know if you have any questions.
Slides from Ignite San Diego 2
This presentation was essentially the launch of Open San Diego. We’re still a few months away from beginning our projects, but Ignite was a great opportunity to explain our mission and find people excited to join our cause.
