Workshop: Intro to Plyr (Wk 1)

What

Join us for another CDVG workshop where we will learn about Plyr (http://plyr.had.co.nz/), ggplot2 creator Hadley Wickham's R Library for munging data. Hadley describes Plyr as "a set of tools for a common set of problems: you need to split up a big data structure into homogeneous pieces, apply a function to each piece and then combine all the results back together."

Read more about Plyr on the R-Bloggers website (http://www.r-bloggers.com/tag/plyr/).

When & Where

The Plyr workshop will be taught in the IMSA classroom at 1871 (https://www.meetup.com/The-Chicago-Data-Visualization-Group/events/89508672/www.1871.com) from 6 - 9 pm on Monday, November 5and conclude on Monday, November 19 (2 evenings of work skipping Monday, November 12). This workshop will be lead by fellow CDVG member Gabe Gaster (see below for more about Gabe). Please bring $5 if you want pizza that evening. Drinks are available for purchase at 1871.

RSVP'ing

This workshop will be conducted over two nights and you need to register for both sessions on Meetup. I've included links to each meeting below.

Week 1 (https://www.meetup.com/The-Chicago-Data-Visualization-Group/events/89508672/) Week 2 (https://www.meetup.com/The-Chicago-Data-Visualization-Group/events/89519022/) Once again, the classroom is limited to 30 people. The ggplot2 workshop filled up quickly and has an active waitlist so I suggest you sign up early for the Plyr workshop. Please also consider your fellow members and update your RSVP if you cannot attend the workshop.

Regarding the suddeness of the Plyr workshop and the schedule for the ggplot2 workshop

The Plyr workshop is being announced on short notice because Tom Schenk, ggplot2 workshop leader, has to be out of town on the final night of the workshop (Nov. 5). Plyr is a topic that has come up a few times during the ggplot2 workshop and we are fortunate that Gabe is able to step in at the last minute to conduct this workshop.

The final night of our ggplot2 workshop originally scheduled for November 5th will be conducted on November 12th.

About Gabe Gaster

Learn about Gabe and his experience learning plyr (http://www.gabegaster.com/post/21657426855/biblical-baby-names) on his blog. Also, take a look at the ggplot2 heat map (http://www.gabegaster.com/post/33698087095/the-grammar-of-graphics-and-another-kind-of-heat-map)he created from what he has learned during CDVG's ggplot2 workshop if you are interested.

More info

The meetup will mostly focus on the split-apply-recombine strategy, although the data-munging will be done in service of visualizations, very much building on the work we've been doing in ggplot2.

Gabe recommends that everyone download and install RStudio on their machines -- as this is the R development environment that we will be using in class. Before class, it would be ideal if people took the time to install plyr and stringr. This can be done by running the following command in R:

install.packages(plyr, ggplot2, stringr)

The code and data for the class is available on Gabe's dropbox, here (https://dl.dropbox.com/u/1609013/MeetUp.zip).