Ten-Day Online Workshop on Research Methods & Data Analysis: A Brief Report

摘要

The ten-day workshop on "Research Methods and data Analysis" was organized by A. K. Dasgupta Centre for Planning and Development, Visva-Bharati dated from 22nd February to 3rd March, 2021. The workshop was successfully held online through Google Meet platform. 18 participants actively attended the workshop. The group was made small so that each one of the participants can learn the software clearly, thus hands-on training can be provided easily. The workshop was divided into two sessions each day comprising total of twenty sessions in ten days. 22nd February, 2021: In the inaugural session, Prof. Daya Shankar Kushwaha, Secretary of Professor A.K. Dasgupta Centre for Planning and Development, Visva-Bharati welcome the participants and asked to introduce themselves. He briefly stated the objectives and the utility of the workshop to researchers and faculty members. His inaugural speech was followed by Dr. Pravesh Tamang, Department of Economics, Presidency University as the resource person. The session included introduction to R and R Studio. Installation of R and R studio was well explained by him. R is a programming language and open source software developed by Ross Ihaka and Robert Gentleman in 1993. R possesses an extreme catalog of graphical and statistical methods. R is used for statistical inference, Data analysis, Machine learning algorithm. R is available for Windows, Mac and Unix systems (such as Linux). Big companies, geographers, psychologists, management people use R for data analysis because of the robustness of R. Data analysis with R can be done using a series of steps. These steps are programming, transforming, discovering, Modelling and communicating. For the second session as well, Dr. Pravesh Tamang was the resource person where he explained the data structures or data types in R Programming, which are vectors (logical, character, numerical), matrices, data frames, scalars, lists. He then discussed how to create a data frame in R, how to append a column to data frame, how to select a column of a data frame, how to subset a data frame, variables, arithmatic and logical operators.