Data Reproducibility

In this section, we will gain some skills related to gaining access to and manipulating data. In the process, we will introduce a data set from the Rice Rivers Center that we will return to again and again throughout the course.

A key requirement of our profession is the ability to reproduce our experimental results in such a way so that others may validate the science we do. As a community, we must strive to improve this reproducibility as it is key to the development of knowledge and the foundation on which we understand the world around us.

In this section, we are going to explore how we store and retrieve data in a way that minimizes confusion and sloppiness. Then we will be introduced to RMarkdown as a framework within which we can fuse together our writing, data, analyses, and output in such a way as to minimize the amount of different platforms and systems we use to communicate our data.

Here are a few links to data sets.

• The iris data set is a raw CSV file that you can download.
• The Rice Rivers data set is a link we want to use for accessing directly from within R.