Welcome to FST 5734

Author

Jacob Lahne

Published

July 6, 2026

Welcome!

This is the website for FST 5734 Fall 2026, which provides material for every lecture and homework assignment for the semester.

Materials

You can access the source code for these pages at the corresponding github (jlahne/fst-5734-fall26). You can also get to the specific code for every page by clicking this button:

Please note that some of the github .qmd source code will not Render properly in RStudio when downloaded because the data is not publicly available, and so isn’t uploaded to this repository. If you are taking this course at Virginia Tech, you have access to this data through the Canvas site by downloading the FST-5734-workspace.zip file instead.

Readings

This course doesn’t have a textbook, but each lecture recommends readings which are typically from the following sources:

R for Data Science (R4DS) (Wickham and Grolemund (2017))
Data Visualization (Healy (2019))
STAT545 (Bryan 2026)
Practical Statistics for Data Scientists (Bruce and Bruce (2017))
The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science (Healy (2024))

Tools

You should download first R, then RStudio.

R: https://cran.r-project.org/
RStudio: https://posit.co/downloads

License

References

Bruce, Peter, and Andrew Bruce. 2017. Practical Statistics for Data Scientists. O’Reilly.

Healy, Kieran. 2019. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton University Press.

Healy, Kieran. 2024. The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science.

Wickham, Hadley, and Garrett Grolemund. 2017. R for Data Science. O’Reilly.