R for Social Science: A Big Picture Introduction

Instructor: Benjamin A.T. Graham
Slide Deck by Benjamin A.T. Graham, Luis Gruson, and Bethlehem Kelecha
Video Editing: Ashley Abadeer
R is a powerful and flexible tool for data management, analysis, and visualization. This video is narrated by Benjamin A.T. Graham, a principle investigator in the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab at the University of Southern California. Watch Ben introduce the SPEC Lab curriculum in applied data science and explain why you should invest in learning to use R for data management and data visualization.
This video is part of the Security and Political Economy (SPEC) Lab curriculum in applied data science. The curriculum includes written walkthroughs, groupwork exercises, and homework (individual) exercises, all of which come with detailed answer keys. So don’t just watch the videos! Mastering this material requires working through the entire self-study curriculum, which is all free on our website.
We cover data management and data visualization, with a focus on political science and international relations applications. This curriculum prepares students for PhD programs in the social sciences as well as jobs as research assistants and data scientists in academia, government, NGOs, and industry. You will learn to write elegant, well-annotated code to extract meaning from data and communicate that meaning to non-technical audiences. We teach data management using the tidyverse package (tidyr and dplyr) and data visualization using ggplot2.