I attended the “Intro to R” workshop led by Chen Zhou and it was interesting to see, as a complete beginner how R is used. We discussed some of the top applications it’s used for which included statistical analyses, visualization, and data transformation. Our main program was the online version of RStudio on Posit Cloud. We also got to see how Chen is currently using R for a project she’s working on which addresses the difference between how men vs women pronounce vowels.

I did appreciate doing some basic exercises just to get familiar and practice with the syntax. We looked at basic functions and the use cases they could be applied to. Some of the syntax reminded me of other coding languages but other parts of it were completely new to me. For example, using pull and pipe to get the maximum value for a particular column in a dataset. Truthfully, unless it ends up being required for work or something equally important, I don’t plan on practicing R on my own time. I was more interested in seeing how it could be used for data viz, but we didn’t get that far since the workshop was only two hours and the majority of it was spent doing the exercises and discussing the answers.  I would’ve loved to see how it compares to other languages like d3.js or Seaborn in Python.

Overall, I liked the introduction to the coding language but wish we had more time to explore the data visualization side of it.