Lab 01 Software Setup

• R and RStudio
• IBM SPSS
• Microsoft Excel
• Tableau

Welcome to start the journey in working with data! Through this quarter, we will learn how to conduct data analysis and visualization using R, RStudio, Tableau, and/or IBM SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). There are tons of resources, both online and within University of Washington, for you to start learning data science, check resource page.

We will have about 15 labs in total and you don’t need to submit anything after the lab sessions. We will provide two concurrent sessions for most labs, one using R (coding-based) and another one using SPSS (interface-based). In the first a few labs, we encourage all students to explore R and RStudio.

You can also attend some session in R while others in SPSS. This class is not a software or coding class so that we will not evaluate based on your proficiency of certain tools. If you have already learned other software or languages, such as Stata or Python, you are welcome to use them for the assignments, but the instructor and TA will not provide platform-specific assistance beyond R and SPSS.

R and RStudio

Why R and RStudio?

Coding is terrifying for some people, but it is easier than ever because of generative AI. We strongly encourage you to use R (a free, open-source software environment for statistical computing and graphics) and RStudio (an open-source integrated development environment) as your main tools for quantitative analysis this quarter, because:

• R is free and open source.
• R has a very large community.
• R reads virtually any data format.
• R makes replication easy: an analysis is a script you can re-run, not a sequence of clicks you have to remember.
• R is a programming language, so it does not stop where a menu stops.
• R skills transfer to other languages such as Python and Julia.

R Studio is a “front-end” or integrated development environment (IDE) for R that can make your life easier. We’ll show RStudio can…

• Organize your code, output, and plots
• Auto-complete code and highlight syntax
• Help view data and objects
• Enable easy integration of R code into documents with R Markdown
• Manage git repositories
• Run interactive tutorials

Selling you on R Markdown

The ability to create R Markdown files is a powerful advantage of R:

• Document analyses by combining text, code, and output
  • No copying and pasting into Word
  • Easy for collaborators to understand
  • Show as little or as much code as you want
• Produce many different document types as output
  • PDF documents
  • HTML webpages and reports
  • Word and PowerPoint documents
  • Presentations
• Works with \(\LaTeX\) and HTML for math and more formatting control

R and RStudio Installation

Try to complete the setup before the first class. The goal of this assignment is simply to make sure that you have R up and running and can open the source document of this page, a rmd (R Markdown) file.

If R & RStudio aren’t running and installing properly you may need to update your operating system. Don’t worry too much if you can’t get them installed and running, we will install them during the class as well.

1. Download and install R, see here: https://cran.r-project.org/
2. Download and install RStudio Desktop, see here: https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/
3. Windows video guide and Mac video guide.
4. For Windows user, you may also need to install Rtools.

The latest version of R is 4.6.1 (Happy Hop). You can check by typing R.version into your RStudio Console or run it in one chunk.

IBM SPSS

SPSS is a commercial, point-and-click package long established in social science statistics, and UW provides licenses to students through UWare. You should follow the instruction on UWIT’s page to download, install, and activate SPSS.

Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is a spreadsheet program to format, organize, calculate, and visualize data. It is subscription-based software service and a part of Microsoft Office 365. UW provides licenses to students through UWare. You should follow the instruction on UWIT’s page to download, install, and activate Microsoft Office 365.

Tableau

In data visualization session, we are going to use Tableau, a business intelligence and analytics platform that allows users to create interactive visualizations and dashboards to understand data. It provides free access to students. You can follow the instruction to download, install, and activateTableau for Students.