Computing prerequisites

In preparation for this course, you should have several software applications installed onto your computer and ready to use them.

Required

Install the latest operating system for your computer¹, and then the latest versions of R (free, open-source)², RStudio (free, open-source)³, and several R packages. To install the R packages, open RStudio and run the following command:

install.packages(
  c(
    "bayesplot", "beeswarm", "bookdown", "broom", "colorspace", 
    "crosstalk", "d3Network", "dagitty", "diagram", "directlabels", 
    "distill", "eulerr", "extrafont", "extrafontdb", "flexdashboard", 
    "flextable", "geojsonio", "GGally", "ggalt", "ggdendro", "ggforce", 
    "ggfx", "ggiraph", "ggmap", "ggnetwork", "ggnewscale", 
    "ggplotlyExtra", "ggraph", "ggrastr", "ggrepel", "ggridges", 
    "ggtext", "ggthemes", "glue", "htmlwidgets", "igraph", "kableExtra",
    "knitr", "latex2exp", "magick", "margins", "Matrix", "purrr", 
    "networkD3", "packcircles", "particles", "patchwork", "polyclip", 
    "r2d3", "ragg", "reticulate", "rgdal", "rgl", "rmarkdown", "rolldown", 
    "rstanarm", "sf", "stringi", "stringr", "svglite", "threejs", 
    "tidygraph", "tidymodels", "tidytext", "tidyverse", "tinytex", 
    "transformr", "upsetjs"
  )
)

We will be using R Markdown files to write and create reports. One good resource to become familiar with what we’ll use is on the “Get Started” menu at https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/index.html.

Recommended

Citation and document management

For organizing and citing source material, install Zotero (free, open-source), which integrates with RStudio to automatically organize and properly cite your sources (this course website is even linked to my Zotero library to keep everything up-to-date with my reference information).

To get you started — whoop, whoop — you can import into your library all the references I’ve cited for your course by downloading this bibliography file, opening Zotero and in its menu, selecting File | Import...

Version control

Open a free github account, and install gitub desktop. This will help with version control of your projects, and allow collaboration with me and other students.

Point-and-click, corporate tool

Early in the course, we will focus on best practices in reproducible communications, which involve coding. But businesses also sometimes use more limited, point-and-click style software like Tableau for those who do not code. For comparisons with other visualization tools, I’ve included a table to our selected topics. We will discuss use cases when covering interactive communications; obtain a free, one-year student license beforehand⁴ .

Python

In the first class, we will discuss a one-to-one comparison in writing code in R with packages versus Python with packages for data transformation and visualization. While course demonstrations and homeworks focus on R, I encourage you to also translate your work to Python as demonstrated for practice. Of note: I do not generally recommend using Anaconda or Miniconda for package management in Python as it tends to be fragile and can break other software. Instead, I install the latest version of Python⁵ and then manage packages using pip3, though the setup is beyond the scope of this course.

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1. I’m running MacOS Ventura 13.2.1, but you may use Windows or Linux too.↩︎

2. I’m running R version 4.3.3 (2024-02-29).↩︎

3. I’m running RStudio 2022.12.0+353 (2022.12.0+353) Release for macOS.↩︎

4. It’s otherwise proprietary and expensive.↩︎

5. I’m currently running Python version 3.11.1.↩︎