We’ve pretty much gotten through the material in the Intro to R course from UCLA, and covered some neat supplementary content as well (for a one-stop shopping experience of the topics we’ve covered so far, see the Week 6 Review). For the last few weeks of Fall 13 R Club, we’d like to focus on individual projects. The goal is for everyone to come up with an R project for him/herself, and then spend the rest of term trying to do it. Ideally, this should be a task that’s actually useful to you. For example, perhaps you have some analyses you’ve been doing in another environment (SPSS? HLM? MPlus?), but you’d like to try to translate the work to R to check whether the results come out the same. Or maybe there’s a data cleaning procedure in your lab that currently involves work by hand in Excel or something, and you’d like to automate it. Alternatively, if you don’t have any project of your own that you’d like to work on, you can join the effort to translate PSY611/612/613 into R – we’d like to be able to provide clearly annotated R scripts to do all the tasks currently presented in SPSS for the whole sequence. Vive la revolution!

The aim of these individual projects is two-fold: 1) To give you a productive, collaborative space so you can work through a project that’s useful to you and (this is key) have the opportunity to ask questions when you get stuck/frustrated instead of just smashing your computer with a coffee mug alone in your apartment at 3am; and 2) To develop a pool of resources that we all share, so everyone can benefit from our collective problem solving efforts. To facilitate both question-answering and resource-sharing, please post your code online (preferably to BitBucket) and share it with your fellow rclubers. BitBucket provides an excellent environment for people to help you with your code when you get stuck, and also if everyone has access to each other’s code, then we can all learn from the solutions everyone comes up with. Also, it would be great if you could write up a brief summary of what your code does, and include any useful resources you found while working on it, and then add it to the blog as a new post with a link to your code on BitBucket. I’ll add a post category called “projects”, so please tag your post with that label – that way we’ll be able to view all the project posts in one place easily. You might find it useful to create the post early, before your code is done, to give your R Club collaborators some sense of what you’re trying to do so it’s easier for them to help you. I think you should all have “author” access, but if you have trouble figuring out how to post to the blog, send me an email.

If you have trouble getting set up with BitBucket or TortoiseHg (which is not unlikely if you’ve never used programs like this before), the weekly R Club meeting is a great place to troubleshoot with friends. Ask for help.