Publications by Tyler Simko
Lesson 1: The Basics of R
1. Data Throughout this entire course, you will use code to do things with data. R can deal with many types of data, like numbers (3, 0, 2021), letters and words called characters (“Data”, “South Amboy”, “Tyler”), and many many others. For example, go to your console (the panel called “Console” with the > character at the bottom) ...
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Lesson 2: Datasets
In Lesson 1, we learned about objects. Vectors are objects with multiple values. For example, you could have vectors that tell you the population and year for a particular area. Like this: pop <- c(100, 347, 500) year <- c(2019, 2020, 2021) You can type the name of the object to see these values and also use functions on them just like before: po...
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Lesson 3: Data Visualization
1. Building a plot Looking at a dataset is nice, but we will often want to visualize our data. R has incredibly powerful tools for data visualization. To start, load the tidyverse library and read the presidential elections data from yesterday1 and take a look at it to remind yourself: library(tidyverse) elections <- read_csv("pres_elections.csv"...
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Lesson 6: Practice and Advanced Plotting
We have already covered a lot! Let’s take a step back and review everything that we have learned so far. This is based very closely on a practice exam I gave to my Harvard students in Fall 2020. We will use data from the College Scorecard, a public dataset from the US Department of Education that contains information about colleges and universi...
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Gov 50 - Additional Exercises
Create an object called population with the value 412,367. Make a second object called births, assign it the value 3012. Then add the two together. Go into the console and type ?abs to open the documentation for the abs() function. Come up with an example that shows what it does. The function sum() will add all the values in a vector. Run ?sum to...
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Gov50 — Lesson 2: Studying with RMarkdown
Creating a place to store your code First, we’ll start by making a new folder for your course material like we just discussed. Make a new folder somewhere in your Documents folder called something like “Gov50” or “gov_50” (remember – no spaces!): PC: Open your "Computer" -> "Documents" -> Right click -> "New" -> "Folder" Mac: Open "F...
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Gov50 — Lesson 1: Setting up
For Gov 50, you will need to install some free and safe software. This document will walk you through installing the tools we will be using in this course. Installing R First, we will install a programming language called R. This is the tool we will be using throughout the course to analyze data and make plots. R is a programming language that w...
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Tutorial: Working with Census Data in R
Data from the US Census Bureau can be invaluable resources for doing research. The enormous scale of Census data (both breadth over time and depth from options!) can be overwhelming, so this tutorial is intended to guide students to using Census Data in R. Although it is possible to manually download data from the Census (if you would prefer to d...
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Gov 50 - Notes on Chapter 1
1. Data R can deal with many types of data, like numbers (3, 0, 2021), letters and words called characters (“Data”, “Gov 50”, “Professor Lo”), and many many others. For example, in the grey box below this message surrounded by the “`” character, type 3 and press the green arrow (or CMD + Enter on a Mac / Ctrl + Enter on PC): 3 ## ...
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Gov 50: Notes on Chapter 2
cup <- read.csv("worldcup50.csv") Useful functions dim(cup) ## [1] 13 12 head(cup) ## X year team scored conceded penalties matches shots_on_goal won drawn ## 1 1 1950 Brazil 22 6 0 6 22 4 1 ## 2 2 1950 Uruguay 15 5 0 4 15 3 1 ## 3 3 1950 Swede...
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