R Workshops

R is a language and environment for data manipulation, calculation and graphical display. The term “environment” is intended to characterize it as a fully planned and coherent system of data analysis software.

This year the guiding theme for the R working group sessions will be the use of computational methods and data in demography, which begs the question “what is computational demography”? The exact definition is most likely up for negotiation, but we suggest that it involves conducting research with new sources of data, as well as using new methods to analyze traditional data (Kashyap et.al., 2023). Delving into these new areas can be greatly enhanced with additional skills more closely associated with computer science. Parts of this workshop are adapted from Jason Thomas’ previous workshop.

New to Fall 2026:

• Use of APIs to automate data mining (think PubMed, Images)
• Publishing academic literature involving R
• Access to specialty databases available to Ohio State researchers (faculty and staff)
• More “smart” LLM/AI practices and integration within R
• “Communicating” with other researchers and data/code portability and working in teams
  • If we have time, will delve into making your own packages/published code for R

All workshops are subject to change depending on interest from participants of the sessions or noteworthy advances in computation. No previous experience required.

Please bring your own computer that is from at least 2014 and running Mac or Windows, otherwise the instructor might not be able to diagnose any software/hardware/code issues that arise during the sessions. 

Building off Spring 2026 will be the insight of Neel Agarwal BS, third year medical student, to give a healthcare and big-data lens as well as teach real-world applications and ground sessions in practical applications to enhance your research, QI projects, or even hobbyist works. Specific dates the workshop will take place are 9/14, 9/28, 10/12, 10/26, 11/9, 11/23, 12/7.

Fall 2026 workshops will generally be offered every other Monday, September 14 – December 7, from 4:30 – 5:30 p.m. in IPR’s conference space, Townshend Hall, room 038 and via Zoom. See details below.

Fall 2026 R Workshops

September 14: Introduction to R & Computational Methods in Demography (with a healthcare big data analysis twist)

September 28: Exploring and Preparing Data with dplyr, tidyverse and Healthcare Analysis 1

October 12: Making Plots in R with ggplot2 & AI Integration 1

October 26: Web Scraping with R with rvest and rselenium & AI Integration 2

November 9: Text Analysis – Data Preparation with tidytext

November 23: Text Analysis II – Topic Modeling, Healthcare Analysis 2

December 7: Machine Learning and Imputation using missForest and parallelize

Zoom invitation link

For additional materials please visit: 

• R working group GitHub page

• R working group website