Week 1: Getting Organized

You already have an account on the Macalester RStudio server <rstudio.macalester.edu>. Login with your Macalester email credentials.

In this brief session, we will:

Get everyone started with using the software for the course.
Install many of the R packages that will be needed for the course.
Create a GitHub account and “clone” (using SSH¹) the repository at https://github.com/dtkaplan/Comp-110-Assignments-Spring-2017 to give you the files you will be modifying as you work in the course. Once you have done so, please fill in this form so that I will know your account name.
Clone (again) the repository you created in (3) into RStudio as a “project”" to hold your work in the course.
Open the Week-1-project.Rmd file in the RStudio editor. You’ll put some “markdown” content about a historical event or person into that document, then compile it to HTML, and update your GitHub repository with the new file.

Relevant links:

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Week 2: Data Infrastructure

Readings: Data Computing Chapters 1 through 4
Week 2 online tutorial Don’t do this in class! Do it afterwards.
Short-answer questions from book: file Week-2-short-answer.Rmd
- 1.1, 1.2, 1.4, 1.5
- 2.2, 2.3, 2.4, 2.6, 2.7, 2.8, 2.8, 2.9, 2.10
- 3.1, 3.2, 3.3, 3.4, 3.5, 3.6
- 4.1, 4.2, 4.3, 4.4, 4.5
In-class activity:
- The library collection
- file: Week-2-project.Rmd
Notes from class: tidy data : Tidy data paper : R parts of speech : highway fatality data
In-class activity:
- Library book use.
- Use file Week-2-project.Rmd
In-class links:
- Group spreadsheets: Group-1; Group-2; Group-3; Group-4; Group-5; Group-6
- Table about marital status in the US armed forces
- Taxicab example: news story & an interactive site with the data.

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Readings: Data Computing chapters 5, 6, & 7
Week 3 online tutorials: Chapter 3, Chapter 4, Chapter 5, Chapter 6, Chapter 7
Short-answer questions from book: File Week-3-short-answer.Rmd
- 5.1, 5.2
- 6.5, 6.6, 6.7, 6.8
- 7.1, 7.4, 7.5, 7.7, 7.11, 7.12
In-class activity
- Intro to graphics and wrangling.
- Use file Week-3-project.Rmd
Notes from class:
- Data graphics: glyphs, frames, and scale : eye training for data graphics
- Wrangling: basic verbs, group and summarise
- Examples: a map of the stars : words in Moby Dick :

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Readings: Data Computing chapters 8 & 9
Week 4 online tutorials: Chapter 8, Chapter 9
Short-answer questions: from book. File Week-4-short-answer.Rmd
- 8.1, 8.2, 8.3
- 9.1, 9.3
In-class activity
- Handout: Births and holidays
- Use file Week-4-project.Rmd
Notes from class:
- Data verbs
- More transformation verbs
- Warm up - world cities

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Readings: Data Computing chapters 10 & 11
Short-answer questions from book: File Week-5-short-answer.Rmd
- 10.1, 10.2, 10.3
- 11.1, 11.3, 11.4, 11.5
In-class activity:
- Handout: Stocks and Dividends or
- A graph from the economist
- Use file Week-5-Project.Rmd
Week 5 links:
- A real-world example of the plots from last week.
- Bird species variant spellings. We’ll use these to clean the OrdwayBirds data.
- State-by-state population estimates from the US Census. Link to CSV file
- PostalAbbreviations <- read.csv("http://tiny.cc/dcf/PostalAbbreviations.csv")
- College Scorecard data:
```
download.file("http://tiny.cc/dcf/Colleges-excerpt.rda", 
      destfile = "Colleges-excerpt.rda")
load("Colleges-excerpt.rda")
```

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Readings: from Data Computing Chapters 12, 13 and 14
Networks: comcast complaints example, immigration, movie genres
Short-answer questions from the book: File Week-6-short-answer.Rmd
- 12.1, 12.2, 12.3
- 13.1, 13.2, 13.3, 13.4
- 14.1, 14.3, 14.7, 14.10
In-class activity:
- Bicycle rentals
- Use file Week-6-Project.Rmd

Spring break

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Readings: Data Computing chapters 15 & 16
Short-answer questions from the book: File Week-7-short-answer.Rmd
- 15.1, 15.2
- 16.1, 16.2, 16.3
In-class activity:
- Scraping Nuclear Reactors or The Word on the Street
- Use file Week-7-Project.Rmd
Additional Resources:
- A regex overview from the stringr package.
- A regex “cheat sheet”
- Johns Hopkins data-cleaning course
- The New York Times on data janitors
In-class links:
- Walmart store-closure data
- Google doc for posting your link to an online source.

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Readings: Data Computing chapter 17
Short-answer questions from the book: File Week-7-short-answer.Rmd
- 17.2
In-class course evaluation. Note that the Google Form is not managed by Macalester, so no information about your name will be collected.
A data science process and how it aligns with the topics covered in this course.
Examples: Selling car seats, Girl or boy, Flowers, Countries, Cars
Introduction to modeling online course. This is the first chapter of an online course being developed as I update the Math 155 (Intro to Statistical Modeling) materials. The course differs from the current Math 155 in that it is based on machine-learning concepts rather than the traditional regression concepts.
In-class activity:
- Unsupervised genetics
- Use file Week-8-Project.Rmd

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This is a short course, so the exam is similarly short. Do it in the 10 days following the last class session.