Exploring lemur olfactory communication

In Fall 2015, we (Kendra Smyth & Lydia Greene) led a Data Expeditions (DE) workshop in Advanced Research in Evolutionary Anthropology, a senior-level class on the research process. The goal of the workshop was to get students familiar with the R language and introduce them to a range of statistical techniques that might be useful for analyzing their own senior thesis data. In the workshop, we used a lemur scent-marking dataset compiled by Greene during her undergraduate honors thesis at Duke. By using these data, we aimed to make statistics seem both accessible and relatable to these students. Although teaching students the specific commands in R is undeniably valuable, the true reward from the Data Expeditions came from seeing students understand key concepts in statistics and from giving them the tools to begin the process of analyzing their own data.