5.1 Getting started

In this lesson we will be using a group of packages which are part of what is known as the tidyverse. These packages include readr for importing data into R, dplyr for handling common data wrangling tasks for tabular data, tidyr which enables you to swiftly convert between different data formats (long vs. wide) for plotting and analysis, lubridate for working with dates, and ggplot2 for visualizing data. You can load these packages individually, or you can install the entire tidyverse in one go.

The packages in the tidyverse, namely dplyr, tidyr and ggplot2 accept both the British (e.g. summarise) and American (e.g. summarize) spelling variants of different function and option names. For this lesson, we utilize the American spellings of different functions; however, feel free to use the regional variant for where you are teaching.

First we are going to use install.packages() to install tidyverse. Then we are going to load tidyverse with the library() function. You only need to install a package once, but you will load it each time you start a new r session. To learn more about dplyr and tidyr after the workshop, you may want to check out this handy data transformation with dplyr cheatsheet and this one about tidyr.