Web Science and Digital Libraries Research Group

The devastation wrought by the 11 March earthquake in Japan, and the depths of the human misery left in the wake of the massive Tsunami have left many people awestruck. The size of the quake itself was enormous and many people have had a hard time comprehending just how big this earthquake was. Some sites like Japan Quake Map help us to comprehend the magnitude of this event. As a result of the earthquake and tsunami the nuclear reactor at Dai-ichi was severely damaged and has been leaking radiation. The radiation readings have been made available by WIDE and Japan's Nuclear Safety Division . The idea was to use R to create an informative map of Japan showing the radiation levels of the different prefectures. Python was used to import the data from both of the web sites and insert it into a MySQL database. The format of both of the pages was understandably quite dynamic and resulted in the python script needing to be tweaked quite often. Sometimes it was easier to just copy

As part of Dr. Weigle's CS 796/896 Visual Analytics Seminar I will offer a tutorial on the statistical computing software R . I will give an hands-on introduction into data input/output, simple data manipulation, and (of course) plotting. If you for example always wondered how to fill data vectors, import data from MySQL databases, compute the mean and standard deviation, execute logic, ranking and sorting operations, compute correlations and linear regressions, use loops and write functions as well as create scatter-, bar-, box- and other plots and all that in R, you will enjoy this tutorial. The tutorial is targeted towards course participants which have a natural interest in data visualization but it also has merit for other MS and Ph.D. students doing research and consequently dealing with and plotting data. While this introduction naturally can not cover all aspects of R and does not claim to be exhaustive, it will help students getting started with the software and the ma