R and Statistics for Archaeologists
Course overview
The teaching materials on this site are intended for teaching Statistics and R programming workshops to archaeologists.
This course follows the tidyverse philosophy of understanding and analysing your data through a repeated cycle of transforming, visualising, and modelling.
Upcoming and past workshops can be found here:
Course modules
The course contains multiple modules that can be used to construct workshops of varying durations and customised to suit the participants’ needs.
Core
The core module contains an introduction to R and RStudio, an example workflow, and data import and cleaning.
Durations are rough estimates.
| Component | Description | Materials | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Setup | Installation of R and RStudio | 00 - Getting Started | Unknown |
| R Basics | Basics of the R programming language | Code-along: 01 - R Basics | Unknown |
| Example workflow | Code-along: 02 - An Example Workflow | ~1 hour | |
| Project organisation | A brief discussion of how to organise a project with RStudio Projects. | Code-along: 03 - Getting Organised Slides: 01 - RStudio Projects |
~10 mins |
| Cleaning Data | Importing and cleaning data from a .xlsx file. | Code-along: 04 - Cleaning Data | Unknown |
| Stats basics | Basics of statistics | Slides: 02 - Stats Basics | Unknown |
Understand
| Component | Description | Materials | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Visualising Data | Visualising the cleaned data with ggplot2 | Code-along: 05 - Visualising Data | ~100 mins |
| Transforming Data | Transforming the cleaned data with dplyr | Code-along: 06 - Transforming Data | ~120 mins |
Communicate
| Component | Description | Materials | Duration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Communicating Results | Creating a Quarto document to combine narrative and code with output | Code-along: 08 - Communicating Results | ~90 mins |
Extensions
Future work is planned on the following extensions (help needed!):
- Collaborative coding with Git(Hub)
- Reproducible Research
- Topic-specific modules
- Skeletal age-at-death and sex estimation
- Radiocarbon dating
- Dendrochronology
- etc.
Course outcomes
Understand enough to explore more on your own and be able to solve the issues you run into. Because you will run into issues. Everyone runs into issues. It’s VERY satisfying once you have solved them, though.