5 Finch Project

5.1 Join Course Workspace

Your instructor has set up a course workspace on Posit Cloud.

Go to D2L to find the link to the course workspace and click on it. You may need to sign in to Posit Cloud again if you have not signed in recently.

After the page loads, click “Join Space”.

Once you have joined, you will now see two spaces listed under Spaces in the navigation panel on the left. The first is Your Workspace, the second is the course workspace, for example Org Bio 2023. Select Course Workspace.

5.2 Start Project

In your Course Workspace, you will see a list of projects:

• Finch Selection Example
• Intraspecific Variation Analysis
• Artificial Selection Analysis

Click Finch Selection Example to create your own copy of that project that can be accessed by both you and the instructor.

5.3 Find data file

In the bottom right pane, click the Files tab.

You should see several files, including one that says finches-data.xlsx. This is an Excel file containing the finch data.

To see the raw data, you can click the file name, then “View File” to download and open the Excel file.

Warning: do not click “Import Dataset…”. We use a different method for importing the data to R, which you will learn in the next section.

5.4 Inspect data file

After opening the raw data file, test your understanding by answering the following questions with your lab partner. You do not have to turn this in.

• How many observations (rows) are there?
• What does each row represent?
• How many variables (columns) are there?
• What are the names of the variables? (The first row contains the variable names) Note that the names are not capitalized and use underscores (_) instead of spaces. This is important when writing R code.

Close the Excel file and switch back to Posit Cloud.