Data Topics

This guide provides links to the "Data Topics" series of workshops by Ryan Womack, Data Librarian.

The data_topics Github repository collects materials for this series.

The Data Topics series covers Data Analysis, Data Visualization, Data Sources, and Data Publication.  There is an emphasis on implementation using the R statistical software, but it is not exclusively about R.

The workshops are:

• Data Analysis 1 (overview, data methods, and data wrangling with R + comparison with Python) (coming Spring 2026)
• Data Analysis 2 (statistical tests, distributions, regression, bootstrap with R + comparison with Python)
• Data Visualization 1 (visualization methods with R + comparison with Python) (coming Fall 2026)
• Data Visualization 2 (interactive visualizations with Shiny, including hosting a Shiny server)
• Data Publication 1 (creating reproducible research, literate programming documents, and using knitr, Sweave, blogdown, and bookdown) (coming Fall 2025)
• Data Publication 2 (publishing to data repositories and creating R packages)
• Data Sources 1 (Overview of major data resources, methods of locating data, with focus on diversity and data for minoritized and underrepresented groups) (coming Spring 2025)
• Data Sources 2 (US and foreign government data resources, along with APIs and R packages for accessing them) (coming Spring 2027)

Consult the tabs at the left for workshop materials.  Use the workshop schedule below to check for upcoming presentations.

The Data Topics series is being phased in gradually to refresh the material covered in the prior version of the R workshop series.  Materials for those workshops are available on the R guide.

For more data science topics, such as Python and Machine Learning, check the Data Science guide.

The full New Brunswick Libraries workshop schedule is at