Git should be installed on your computer as part of your Bash install (see the Shell installation instructions).
May 22-23, 2026
9:00 am - 4:00 pm EST
Instructors: Claire Zwiers Cook
Helpers: Mallory Mintz, Lizzy Wu, Sean Anderson
The Carpentries project comprises the Software Carpentry, Data Carpentry, and Library Carpentry communities of Instructors, Trainers, Maintainers, helpers, and supporters who share a mission to teach foundational computational and data science skills to researchers.
Want to learn more and stay engaged with The Carpentries? Carpentries Clippings is The Carpentries' biweekly newsletter, where we share community news, community job postings, and more. Sign up to receive future editions and read our full archive: https://carpentries.org/newsletter/
Software Carpentry aims to help researchers get their work done in less time and with less pain by teaching them basic research computing skills. This hands-on workshop will cover basic concepts and tools, including program design, version control, data management, and task automation. Participants will be encouraged to help one another and to apply what they have learned to their own research problems.
For more information on what we teach and why, please see our paper "Best Practices for Scientific Computing".
Who: The course is aimed at graduate students and other researchers. You don't need to have any previous knowledge of the tools that will be presented at the workshop.
Where: 10 Ocean Science Circle Drive, Savannah, GA, 31411. Get directions with OpenStreetMap or Google Maps.
When: May 22-23, 2026; 9:00 am - 4:00 pm EST Add to your Google Calendar.
Requirements: Participants must bring a laptop with a Mac, Linux, or Windows operating system (not a tablet, Chromebook, etc.) that they have administrative privileges on. They should have a few specific software packages installed (listed below).
Registration:
Please register for the workshop using
this Google Form.
Accessibility: We are committed to making this workshop accessible to everybody. The workshop organizers have checked that:
We are dedicated to providing a positive and accessible learning environment for all. We do not require participants to provide documentation of disabilities or disclose any unnecessary personal information. However, we do want to help create an inclusive, accessible experience for all participants. We encourage you to share any information that would be helpful to make your Carpentries experience accessible. To request accessibility support for this workshop, please fill out the accessibility support request form. If you have questions or need assistance with the accessibility support form please email us.
Glosario is a multilingual glossary for computing and data science terms. The glossary helps learners attend workshops and use our lessons to make sense of computational and programming jargon written in English by offering it in their native language. Translating data science terms also provides a teaching tool for Carpentries Instructors to reduce barriers for their learners.
Workshop Recordings: Carpentries workshops are designed to be interactive rather than lecture-based, with lessons that build upon one another. To foster a positive online learning environment, we strongly recommend that participants join in real time. As a result, workshop recordings are not recommended and may not be available to learners.
Contact: Please email ccz99536@uga.edu for more information.
Roles: To learn more about the roles at the workshop (who will be doing what), refer to our Workshop FAQ.
Everyone who participates in Carpentries activities is required to conform to the Code of Conduct. This document also outlines how to report an incident if needed.
Please be sure to complete these surveys before and after the workshop.
| Before starting | Pre-workshop survey |
| 9:00 | Introduction to R and R Studio |
| 10:00 | Project management |
| 11:00 | Data Structures |
| 12:00 | Break for Lunch |
| 1:00 | Exploring Data Frames |
| 9:00 | Creating Publication-Quality Graphics with ggplot2 |
| 11:00 | Functions Explained |
| 12:00 | Break for Lunch |
| 1:00 | Dataframe manipulation with dplyr |
| 2:00 | Producing Reports with knitr |
| End | Post-workshop survey |
To participate in a Software Carpentry workshop, you will need access to software as described below. In addition, you will need an up-to-date web browser.
We maintain a list of common issues that occur during installation as a reference for instructors that may be useful on the Configuration Problems and Solutions wiki page.
Git is a version control system that lets you track who made changes to what when and has options for easily updating a shared or public version of your code on github.com. You will need a supported web browser.
You will need an account at github.com for parts of the Git lesson. Basic GitHub accounts are free. We encourage you to create a GitHub account if you don't have one already. Please consider what personal information you'd like to reveal. For example, you may want to review these instructions for keeping your email address private provided at GitHub.
Git should be installed on your computer as part of your Bash install (see the Shell installation instructions).
Please open the Terminal app, type git --version and press
Enter/Return. If it's not installed already,
follow the instructions to Install the "command line
developer tools". Do not click "Get Xcode", because that will
take too long and is not necessary for our Git lesson.
After installing these tools, there won't be anything in your /Applications
folder, as they and Git are command line programs.
For older versions of OS X (10.5-10.8) use the
most recent available installer labelled "snow-leopard"
available here.
(Note: this project is no longer maintained.)
Because this installer is not signed by the developer, you may have to
right click (control click) on the .pkg file, click Open, and click
Open in the pop-up dialog.
If Git is not already available on your machine you can try to
install it via your distro's package manager. For Debian/Ubuntu run
sudo apt-get install git and for Fedora run
sudo dnf install git.
R is a programming language that is especially powerful for data exploration, visualization, and statistical analysis. To interact with R in our lessons, we typically use RStudio.
Install R by:
Install R by:
Install R by:
# at the start of each line, as this indicates a comment and is not part of the command.
# update indices
sudo apt update -qq
# install two helper packages we need
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends software-properties-common dirmngr
# add the signing key for these repos
wget -qO- https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu/marutter_pubkey.asc | sudo tee -a /etc/apt/trusted.gpg.d/cran_ubuntu_key.asc
# add the repo from CRAN
sudo add-apt-repository "deb https://cloud.r-project.org/bin/linux/ubuntu $(lsb_release -cs)-cran40/"
# install R itself
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends r-base
# install dependencies
sudo apt install -y r-base-core r-recommended r-base-dev gdebi-core build-essential libcurl4-gnutls-dev libxml2-dev libssl-dev
sudo apt install --no-install-recommends gdebi-core
# cd ~/Downloads
# download the latest RStudio Server .deb file
wget https://download2.rstudio.org/server/jammy/amd64/rstudio-server-2025.05.1-513-amd64.deb
# install the .deb file
sudo gdebi rstudio-server-2025.05.1-513-amd64.deb
# start the RStudio Server
sudo systemctl start rstudio-server
# enable RStudio Server to start on boot
sudo systemctl enable rstudio-server
http://localhost:8787.If you are using Windows and WSL2, the full in-depth instructions for installing R on WSL2 can be found in this POSIT article.