Welcome

Welcome to the REES data help wiki! Here you can find information on using great tools to help with your research. The purpose of this wiki is to help you with data related tasks. This wiki is hosted on a site called Bitbucket, which we use for version control; you can read more about version control in the Git resource.

Table of contents

• Version control with Git Here's a strong argument for using it: https://peerj.com/preprints/3159.pdf
• Data analysis with R
• Databases

Other resources

• The Turing Way - a guide to reproducible data science: https://the-turing-way.netlify.app.
• Material to learn stats and coding (datascience): https://datasciencebox.org/.
• Johns Hopkins data science lab material: https://jhudatascience.org/.

• Data science for economists course: https://github.com/uo-ec607/lectures.

• GSS QA code and research: https://best-practice-and-impact.github.io/qa-of-code-guidance/

• Code of practice for statistics: https://code.statisticsauthority.gov.uk/

Workflows and reproducibility

• Arguments for saving time and making science reproducible: http://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-017-0160.
• This is a great paper on scientific workflows: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005510.
• Developing a modern data workflow for regularly updated data: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3000125.
• Working with significance: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-019-00857-9.
• citations in markdown: https://www.datasurg.net/2019/05/09/bibliographies-in-rstudio-markdown-are-difficult-heres-how-to-make-it-easy/.

Software and data

• Tidy data will help! http://dx.doi.org/10.18637/jss.v059.i10.
• How to organise data in spreadsheets: https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3183v1.
• How to share data for collaboration: https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3139v3.
• How to licence academic software: https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002598.
• Choosing a licence: https://choosealicense.com/.
• Licensing research data: https://www.openaire.eu/how-do-i-license-my-research-data.
• A research institution framework for publishing open code: https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.27762v1.

Data visualisation

• Little of visualisation of design: http://www.visualisingdata.com/2016/03/little-visualisation-design/.
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization: http://serialmentor.com/blog/2018/1/23/fundamentals-of-data-visualization.
• Office National Statistics (ONS) table and graphs guide: https://gss.civilservice.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2018/03/Effective-Tables-and-Charts-in-official-statistics-Edition-2.1-February-2018-4.pdf.
• Home office posters on designing for accessibility: https://github.com/UKHomeOffice/posters/blob/master/accessibility/dos-donts/posters_en-UK/accessibility-posters-set.pdf.
• How the BBC use R for graphics: https://medium.com/bbc-visual-and-data-journalism/how-the-bbc-visual-and-data-journalism-team-works-with-graphics-in-r-ed0b35693535.
• Improving graphics in the Economist: https://medium.economist.com/mistakes-weve-drawn-a-few-8cdd8a42d368.
• Resources for colouring figures:
  • Perils of rainbows: http://doi.org/10.1109/MCG.2007.46
  • Visualisations for colourblindness: https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/viridis/vignettes/intro-to-viridis.html.
  • Colour palettes for sequential, diverging and qualitative data: http://colorbrewer2.org/.
• Plunger plots are a scourge! Neat gif showing why they are horrendous and a full paper.

Posters

• The art of the scientific poster: https://prezi.com/knlu5ybepqc6/the-art-of-the-scientific-poster/ is a presentation by Iain Woodhouse from the School of GeoSciences. Lots of good ideas about arranging content and attracting people to your poster.
• Making posters with Scribus: http://all-geo.org/volcan01010/2012/04/conference_posters_with_scribus/. This page explains why PowerPoint is a bad tool for poster design and offers a free and open source alternative.
• Better posters in less time: https://youtu.be/1RwJbhkCA58. There are some really good ideas in this, but there is still an expectation that posters can be stand alone. I guess there are no right answers. There are PowerPoint templates available (https://osf.io/8ajqs/), but the previous bullet makes a strong argument for using a better tool!
• Posters with R! Including a template for the "better posters" format: https://github.com/brentthorne/posterdown.

Edinburgh user groups

• EdinbR: http://edinbr.org/.
• Coding club: https://ourcodingclub.github.io/.
• R-Ladies Edinburgh: https://www.meetup.com/rladies-edinburgh/.
• Edinburgh data visualisation meetup: https://www.meetup.com/meetup-group-vBHbCmgh/.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.