This is a recording of a recent minimalR workshop. The minimalR workshop is geared towards people with interests in microbial ecology that would like to learn R or to learn it better. So, you shouldn't feel like this isn't for you if you are a beginner. I assume no previous computer programming experience. The workshop is taught via live coding and emphasizes hands on use of R with real data. It uses mothur output files as a starting point, although the principles are broadly applicable. It is taught around the generation of data visualization methods commonly used by microbial ecologists. Along the way we'll learn a number of ways to work with data from within R. Here is a rough outline of what the workshop schedule will look like

  • Ordination
  • Stripcharts and box and whisker plots
  • Line plots
  • Barcharts
  • Subsetting data
  • Reading and writing data
  • Basic parametric and non-parametric analyses


The workshop will give you a pretty thorough set of working examples for how to use packages like readr, dplyr, and ggplot2 with data from mothur; however, prior knowledge of mothur is not a prerequisite. The materials we will follow are available on the Riffomonas website