Welcome back after the winter break!

We are back for more R talks in 2018! Our upcoming meeting will be held on Wednesday 17th of January, at 5.30pm, in G.06, 50 George Square (on the ground floor - see map below). As usual, the meeting will be followed by drinks and chat in the Potting Shed. Meetings are open for all to attend and newcomers / beginners are very welcome. Y’know, the usual. :-)

Our first speaker is Michael Spencer, data scientist and hydrologist. Mike has a PhD from the University of Edinburgh, and has researched snow melt frequency, as well as the link between snow cover and climate fluctuations, using computer simulation, machine learning and statistics. In this talk, he will be telling us about:

Getting started with spatial data
(slides here)

This talk will be a brief introduction to using R (and other open source software) for working with spatial data. The talk will cover:

• types of spatial data
• which software for different parts of your workflow
• some examples of spatial analysis including:
  • shortest path between locations
  • allocation networks
  • digital terrain models
    Some of these topics are shown in the blog post here.

Our second speaker is Susan Johnston, who is a Royal Society Research Fellow within the Institute of Evolutionary Biology at the University of Edinburgh. She will be talking about:

Writing R packages from scratch: a quick-start guide.
(slides here)

R packages are the fundamental units of reproducible R code. Many of us write utility functions to help carry out everyday data tasks, such as data-processing, graphics, and so on. A great way to organise, document and distribute these functions is to wrap them into an R package. I will present a simple workflow using RStudio with the packages devtools and roxygen2 to create a basic R package from scratch.

For any newcomers, here’s a map of where we’ll be.

See you there!

Caterina Constantinescu