AfricaR

Our mission is to achieve improved representation by encouraging, inspiring, and empowering the African population of all genders who are underrepresented in the global R community.

Leadership Team

Leadership team expanded for 2020

Plans for 2020

• Write governing documents (mission statement, CoC)
• Rotating curator Twitter account
• Tutorials in French
• Website (events calendar, blog)
• Package(s) to address African needs, e.g. NLP library that supports Arabic, Swahili, etc.

Forwards

R Foundation taskforce to widen participation of underepresented groups

• Social media
  • Twitter: @R_Forwards
  • Blog: https://forwards.github.io/blog/
• Community
• Conferences
• On-ramps
• Surveys
• Teaching

Why R? Foundation

Initiated to support Why R? Conference in Poland

Money raised also supports

• pre-meetings in Europe
• support grant for women in data science

Extending support to other regions including Africa

R Foundation and R Consortium

The R Foundation is a not-for-profit organization to support R.

• Provides financial support to CRAN, R Core and R Foundation members
• Publishes The R Journal
• Oversees the useR! conference series

The R Consortium is a group of business that support R.

• Provide financial support to R User Groups and Conferences
• Funds coding and community projects

R User Groups

In Africa: Senegal, Ivory Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Tanzania, Eswatini, South Africa - new group starting in Botswana!

Typical meetups

• Talks, e.g.
• Tutorial, e.g. Importing data into R, ggplot2 for data visualisation

R User Groups

Other types of meetup

• Remote talk Dar es Salaam User Group
• Watch party rstudio::conf (live)
• Videos e.g. from useR! conference
• Work through book e.g. R for Data Science
• Tidy Tuesday Workshop
• Hackathon e.g. Open Data Day or Zindi machine learning challenge
• Informal meetup to help each other lunchR or TalkRs

R-Ladies

R-Ladies is a worldwide organization whose mission is to promote gender diversity in the R community.

• Meetup groups: Benin, Ethiopia, Nigeria, South Africa
• R-Ladies Remote (@RLadiesRemote)
  • reading group (~1/month): Next up, Agile Data Science with R
  • coffee chat (~1/month): guided 1 hour chat about R topics
• Abstract review for conferences
• R-Ladies community slack sign up
  • many channels: where in the world, events, r-help

R4DS Online Learning Community

https://www.rfordatasci.com/

Originally to work through R 4 Data Science, now a general learning community.

Join Slack to get help as you learn.

Tidy Tuesday

https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday

Practice your R skills on a new data set (designed for beginners)

• New data set released each week (Monday)
• Practice data wrangling and data visualisation
• Get help on R4DS or R-Ladies community slack

RStudio Community

https://community.rstudio.com/

Online discussion forum (sign-up but no installation required)

Discussion topics

• (tidyverse) packages: dplyr, ggplot2
• R markdown
• RStudio IDE
• Machine Learning and Modelling

Stackoverflow

https://stackoverflow.com/

Q&A site for programming questions.

R questions shold be tagged with [r] plus relevant package/topic tags.

Questions must have a reproducible example (reprex), the reprex R package helps with this.

Best to search for answers to begin with.

See the tour for more information: https://stackoverflow.com/tour.

Twitter

It is so useful there is a book about it! t4rstats.com. The main hashtag is #rstats.

Accounts to follow

• @botswana_r
• @EswatiniUseR
• @AfricaRUsers
• @R_Forwards
• @RLadiesGlobal
• @_R_Foundation
• @RConsortium
• @WeAreRLadies

Other

• Facebook: used by some user groups
• LinkedIn: main group: "The R Project for Statistical Computing"

Conferences

Johannesburg satRday (https://joburg2020.satrdays.org/)

• tutorials and talks

Various international conferences have diversity scholarships:

• useR! (https://www.r-project.org/conferences/)
• rstudio::conf (https://rstudio.com/conference/)

Forwards tips on applying for scholarships

List of R conferences: https://jumpingrivers.github.io/meetingsR/events.html.

Conference videos/material

Many R conferences put talk videos and tutorial material online

useR! 2019

• talks: useR! 2019 Toulouse Talks on YouTube
• tutorials: https://www.user2019.fr/tutorials/

rstudio::conf

• talks: https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2020
• tutorials: https://github.com/rstudio-conf-2020

More conference videos/material

satRday_zaf

• talks: Joburg 2019

Ihaka lecture series

• https://www.auckland.ac.nz/en/science/about-the-faculty/department-of-statistics/ihaka-lecture-series.html

Blogs

Many useful blog posts on new and existing packages, how to do X in R

• R-bloggers (https://www.r-bloggers.com/): use RSS reader like feedly, inoreader
• RWeekly (https://rweekly.org/): can get RSS feed/follow on Twitter
• rladies-blogs channel on R-Ladies Community Slack

Podcasts

Sina Rüeger highlights several R/data science podcasts

https://sinarueeger.github.io/post/podcasts/

She links to this list: https://jumpingrivers.github.io/podcasts/technical-podcasts.html

There is also the Women in Data Science podcast

https://www.widsconference.org/podcast.html

Online books

Books created with the bookdown package: https://bookdown.org/. In particular

• R for Data Science
• R Graphics Cookbook
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization

Some (all?) Manning books can be read online for free, e.g.

• Build a career in data science
• Practical Data Science with R

More online books

Several R books on leanpub can be bought for a price you choose, from free

• Introduction to Data Science
• Exploratory Data Analysis with R

Other

• Modern Statistics for Modern Biology
• ggplot2

Workshop materials

• The R-Ladies groups share their material online and you can search for material via this great shiny app: https://yabellini.shinyapps.io/RLadiesLesson/
• Coding Club (a group at the University of Edinburgh) have developed many tutorials: https://ourcodingclub.github.io/ on data handling, visualisation, modelling and spatial data.
• Free interactive tutorials, including the R Bootcamp (https://github.com/flor14/tutorials).
• List of materials: https://github.com/Chris-Engelhardt/data_sci_guide, often free if don't want certificate.
• R Studio education page: resources for beginners/intermediate/advanced (https://education.rstudio.com/learn/)
• Swirl, learn R in R (https://swirlstats.com/)

Courses

• Chromebook Data Science course (https://jhudatascience.org/chromebookdatascience) covering the fundamentals of data science, materials on leanpub from free.
• Data Science in a Box: https://datasciencebox.org/
• eR-Biostat R/statistics courses (https://er-biostat.github.io/Courses/)

Handling Non-tidy Excel Data

• How to Clean Messy Data in R, blogpost by David Keyes, with useful links
• Spreadsheet Munging Strategies, ebook by Duncan Garmonsway author of unpivotr package, whose README links to other resources e.g. screencasts, worked examples
• Tidying/reshaping tables using tidyr and Joining Data Tables modules from the Colby College "Exploratory Data Analysis in R" course.

Missing Data in R

• R-miss-tastic website: workflows, lectures, workshops, packages, papers

Big Data

• Three Strategies for Working with Big Data in R, blog post by Alex Gold
• Working with Big Data in R, webinar, using dplyr with data stores
• Big Data with R, workshop that covers how to use R to interact databases and Spark
• CRAN task view on High-Performance and Parallel Computing with R, listing relevant packages like bigmemory, bigstatsr
• Tutorial on trelliscope for visualising big data

Machine Learning

Workshops:

• Introduction to Machine Learning with R
• Introduction to Machine Learning with the Tidyverse (rstudio::conf 2020)

Online book: An Introduction to Machine Learning with R

Interactive tutorial: Supervised machine learning case studies in R

Social Media Analytics

• Follow Me: Introduction to social media analysis in R, video of useR! 2018 tutorial by Maria Prokofieva, Saskia Freytag and Anna Quaglieri: Part I, Part II
• Introduction to using Twitter Social media data in R, online lessons by Earth Lab
• Text Mining tutorial by Julia Silge and e-book by Julia Silge and David Robinson
• Social Network Analysis, tutorial by SocialMediaLab
• Social Network Analysis in R, short introduction by Wildon Tucker

Infographics

Some blog posts

• https://www.listendata.com/2019/06/create-infographics-with-r.html
• http://nandeshwar.info/data-visualization/how-to-create-infographics-in-r/

Infographiq package: https://marinebon.org/infographiq/

BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics: https://bbc.github.io/rcookbook/

R for Data Journalism, tutorials for publication quality graphics: https://rddj.info/#publication-quality-graphics