Wrapping up

Congratulations, you’ve taken the first steps on your data analysis and visualization odyssey! We’ve just scratched the surface here, but this may have seemed like a lot of information with very little context. There are some very important things to keep in mind at this point:

First, no one has every package, function, and argument memorized. In fact, many folks who code spent a lot of their time looking at help documentation and other instances of code for inspiration on how to solve a problem.

Second, it’s OK if you feel a little lost. There’s a lot of hidden knowledge here because coding comes with its own terminology and concepts to describe some pretty abstract things. For example, before this lecture, you may not have understood the word ‘argument’ to mean a piece of information we give to a function, and it may take awhile longer before it makes its way into your vocabulary in that sense. I will do my best to try and identify instances of this hidden knowledge and point them out. But if there is ever a time you feel like we’re using a term or concept that isn’t familiar, shout it out!

For now, take a beat, look at the code you’ve helped create, and think about the possibilities of what you might do with R going forward. When you’re ready, you can move on to complete Lab Exercise 1.

Lab Exercise 1

  1. Complete the short quiz on R and RStudio on Canvas. (Note: it may say it is a “practice quiz”, but this will count toward your grade).

  2. Now that you’ve seen how we add the different arguments to the plot function, you can vary the values to make it look differently. Try changing the different aspects of the plot to give it a different look. Some things you might do to really challenge your R skills would be:

    • Using different symbols for the two genera
    • Changing the location of the legend, making sure that it doesn’t cover any of your points
    • Plotting the size of the symbols based on the mean length of shellfish (hint: you may want create a vector from these values and subtract 1 from each value so they’ll fit better)

    Once you’re done, save your plot and send it to me, along with a list of the changes you made.