CVC 2016

Computation and Visualization Consortium

Summer Workshop for Science1 Faculty and Instructors

Working Schedule

A working schedule will be maintained here during the workshop. This will include links to presentations and resources from the workshop.

Feedback and Questions

We have created a Feedback and Questions google doc with questions (and answers) about the workshop.

June 20-24, 2016

The first half of the workshop starts at 9 am on June 20. This portion of the workshop aims to introduce faculty members to the open source software package, RStudio. These days will serve as an introduction to using R for handling data and graphics and include

  • An introduction to the RStudio environment
  • A “Doing More with Less Cookbook” for R
  • Designing and creating sophisticated graphical data visualizations
  • Data wrangling: Manipulating data for graphics and insight
  • Preparing documents that include text, static and dynamic graphics, and analysis

The second half of the workshop begins at noon on June 22. During this time participants will dig in on their own projects – the “work” part of the workshop. Time will be spent:

  • Expanding elements of first half of workshop
  • Planning a case study
  • Development of case studies (individually or in small groups)

In order to support project development, participants will learn specific skills as needed including topics such as:

  • Summarizing data with models
    • how to construct plausible models and fit them
    • displaying models on graphics
    • displaying inferential ideas on graphs
  • Basic data scraping skills (how to get data from web sites)
  • Connecting to and working with large databases in R
  • More advanced data cleaning skills
  • Additional programming skills
  • resampling and bootstrap methods

All aspects of the workshop will be “hands on.” The workshop leaders include several nationally recognized educators in data, graphics, and statistics. You provide the subject-matter expertise, we’ll help you exploit the power of modern compuation.

In your classes …

A major purpose of the second half of the workshop is to provide advice and help in setting up a data visualization/computing project for you to use in your own classes. The tools you will learn are powerful enough that you will be able to create a substantial project during the workshop, and will need just a few hours to tune it up when you get home.

New York City Weather

New York City Weather

A data graphic made with the powerful tools used in the CVC workshop: R, ggplot2 and dplyr.

CVC projects from Summer 2014 included

  • An analysis comparing the lyrics of Beyoncé and Jay Z
  • Dendrogram analysis of gene expression in leukemia
  • A semester’s introductory cell bio and genetics lab
  • Phylogenetics of mite harvestmen biodiversity
  • Using maps in introductory statistics

CVC projects from Summer 2015 included

  1. We construe “science” broadly to include the natural and social sciences, as well as statistics, mathematics, and computer science. If you teach and want to integrate the use of data into your classes, this workshop is for you!↩