Workshops and Teaching

This section provides descriptions of my workshop materials with download links in the titles.

Introduction to R

This workshop covers the basics of creating and manipulating variables, vectors and matricies in R, as well as reading in data from a number of common formats including excel, Stata, SAS and csv.

This workshop builds on the Intro to R workshop and introduces conditional statements, looping, packages, and user defined functions. Examples include building a web scraper for Google scholar and a data management task.

Advanced Data Management in R

This workshop introduces more advanced methods for working with multiple complex datasets in R. I introduce nested looping, more advanced functions and variable scoping, and the apply and plyr families of functions. These methods are applied to a network data cleaning and management example.

Introduction to HPC (UMass)

This tutorial covers a number of concepts and tools for high performance computing and big data analytics in R. In particular, the workshop focusses on parallelization and memory management, as well as basic considerations in remote access. It also addresses a number of security concerns and cluster access at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

HPC 2-Day Workshop (ICPSR Summer 2014)

This workshop covers a number of concepts and tools for high performance computing and big data analytics in R. It focusses more heavily on aspects of R programming for parallelization and the efficient use of functions in Base R. An in-depth example using cross-validation is provided.

Big Data Analytics in R

This presentation describes a number of strategies and programming tricks I have used for working with large-scale text and network data. This talk was given to UMass Graduate Researchers Interested in Data (GRID) on March 31, 2015.

ISSR Data Science Summer Summit 2015

This 3-day intensive workshop covers a number of relevant aspects of Data Science in R, including scientific programming, high performance computing (both parallelization and performant coding) and code distribution (Github and package development). All workshop materials will be made available on Github at the link in the title.

Introduction to LaTeX

This tutorial introduces the LaTeX document preparation system for authoring journal quality papers. I go over the basics of creating your first document and all of the syntax necessary to start writing a paper. The focus of this tutorial is on getting the reader over the initial start-up cost of authoring your first LaTeX document. I also provide a guide to installing LaTeX on most operating systems here.

Intermediate LaTeX and BibTeX

This tutorial covers more advanced concepts in authoring LaTeX documents including hyper references, importing output from Stata and R, and advanced graphics. I also introduce BibTeX, an add-on to LaTeX that handles reference management and automatic bibliography generation.

Introduction to Social Network Theory

Intermediate Social Network Theory

This workshop focusses on developing relational or ``systems" theories. It deals with a number of challenges in this research area and begins to introduce the correspondence between these theories and methods for evaluating them.

CV Formatting

This workshop goes over CV formatting in MS Word and LaTeX and was given after a UMass ISSR faculty panel on CV formatting. See also my slides at a similar event here.

GERGM for Finance Networks

This presentation details the promise and some of the challenges we face in applying relational theories and statistical network models to financial data. This talk was given at the CAFCA/ PERI (UMass-Amherst) Workshop on Financialization, December 13-14, 2014.