The Analytical Methods in Anthropology and Archaeology Seminar (AMAAS) is a graduate level discussion group based at Cambridge University. Our primary objectives are to 1) introduce graduate students to methods and techniques for working with data, 2) foster a friendly environment for sharing failures and successes in data analysis, and 3) provide students with a strong set of tools for making research open-source and reproducible.
This GitHub repository contains tutorials, exercises, and R code for AMAAS workshops.
For the time being, you can find a gentle introduction to R/R Studio, and using two R packages (dplyr and ggplot2) for working with anthropometric data. I hope to add more material in the future for rmarkdown, working with and visualizing GIS data in R, and an introduction to Bayesian statistics.
Some of our exercises use the Goldman osteometric dataset. Instructions for downloading the dataset can be found here: https://github.com/geanes/bioanth.
An introduction to R/ R Studio
- Anatomy of RStudio
- Importing data
- Data formats
- Exploratory data analysis
- Data cleaning
- Installing and using packages
- Executing (extremely) basic statistical tests
"dplyr" is used for manipulating data. It provides an intuitive, grammar-like framework for doing things like exploring and cleaning data.
"ggplot2" is used for visualizing data. It provides a set of highly customizable tools for creating excellent graphics.
AMAAS was conceived by Dr. Jaap Saers (a postdoctoral researcher studying trabecular bone) and myself. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to send me an email at bju23[at]cam.ac.uk 😃