Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am your host, Krista Porter, here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the commission's weekly webinar series where we cover a variety of topics that may be of interest to libraries. We broadcast the show live every Wednesday morning at 10 a.m. central time. But if you're unable to join us on Wednesdays, that's fine. We do record the show as we are doing right now, and it is then posted to our website and archives for you to watch at your convenience. And I will show you at the end of today's show where you can access our archives. Both the live show and the recordings are free and open to anyone to watch. So please do share with your friends, family, neighbors, colleagues, anyone you think might be interested in any of the topics we have on the show. Here at the Nebraska Library Commission, we are the state agency for libraries in Nebraska. And that is for all libraries, so all types of libraries. So you will find topics on our show for all types of libraries. Public, K-12, academic, corrections, museums, archives, anything and everything. We're there, only criteria is something to do with libraries. The cool things we think they're doing, book reviews, interviews, mini training sessions, demos of services and products, all sorts of things. We have Nebraska Library Commission staff that come on and do presentations for us sometimes, and we also bring in guest speakers sometimes. And today we have a mixture of that. Today we are talking about our 2022, 2022, sorry to say, one book, one Nebraska, The Bones of Paradise. And I'm actually going to hand over, I'm not sure who's starting up, Tessa, you maybe? I'm sorry to take away at, and we've got a group of people here with us this morning. And as we get to each section, I think we'll all can introduce yourself at that time when you're doing your bits. Hey everyone, I'm Tessa Therese from the Nebraska Library Commission. And here with us today, we have Nebraska Center for the Book. Becky Faber from the Nebraska Center for the Book. And the One Book, One Nebraska selection committee. We've got our author, John S. A. G. And then we've also got Erica Hamilton from Humanities Nebraska. So those are our speakers for today. I'm just going to hand things over to Christy about one book, one Nebraska in general. And the Center for the Book and what they do. Christy, are you still here? I lost your web, can't my notice just a minute ago? But she is still connected. I don't hear Becky either. I'm on. Oh. You just can't see me. So that's okay. She's just going to be on audio with us today. What's with Christy? Her camera dropped off, so maybe she's lost connection briefly. Can you just start up? I'll get started for Christy. So the Center for the Book is a reading and writing program and organization that just really brings together everyone and anything that has to do with books and Nebraska. We have publishers involved. We have humanities Nebraska organizations involved, museums, authors, booksellers and readers. So it's just a really nice group of people who love talking about Nebraska authors and Nebraska books. So what we've done with the One Book, One Nebraska, we've partnered with Nebraska Center of the Book, Nebraska Library Commission and Humanities Nebraska to choose one book that we can promote across the state for readers. And I'm going to hand that over to Becky for a little bit because she handles our One Book, One Nebraska program. Thank you, Tessa. The process for One Book, One Nebraska begins with the public because all of the nominations for One Book, One Nebraska come from members of the public who nominate a book and that form will come up a little bit later so that you can see what is asked for on the form and how to nominate. And for this year, for the 2022, we started with 35 books being nominated. So we had a very nice amount to start with. What we're looking for is to make sure that the nominated books fill criteria. The book should either be written by a Nebraska author, someone who has lived in Nebraska. They should have, they might also have a Nebraska setting or a Nebraska theme. And for 2022 with the Bones of Paradise, Bingo, we hit all three categories. Once we've been able to determine that nominated books meets a criteria, then those books move forward to a screening committee made up of members of the board for the Center for the Book. So this year we had a reading committee of seven and it's a very intense process. The cutoff date for nominations is the middle of June. And once we have those nominated books, we're checking for criteria and then the reading committee starts reading. And we're reading with the mindset of how the book would appeal to Nebraska readers. We go through several rounds of reading. Every book that moves forward is read by a number of readers. And when we have determined what our shortlist is, then the final vote is made by the full board for the Center for the Book. And the book that has been selected is announced when we have our celebration of Nebraska books in the fall. Are there any questions up to this point? This is our 18th One Book One Nebraska. And as you can see from the slide on the screen, we have had just some remarkable books that we have brought to the state and encouraged reading and discussion. So if we don't have any questions just yet, and you can ask questions at any time, Krysta will kind of moderate that and let us know if anything pops up. But I'm going to hand it over to Jonathan and let her just tell us about her book. Oh, good. Well, I'm just so pleased and honored and thrilled all of the adjectives to be part of this. And I've lived here for 21 years again. I grew up here in Nebraska. And I had never imagined this moment would come to me. And I'm just, I'm just beyond happy. I want to just tell you a moment a little bit about the book. And then I'm, I'm what began the book for me. And then I'll read a little passage from the book for the, you know, starting in 1990, I began to travel into the sand hills of Nebraska. And this is my third book set out in the sand hills. I had never been there before, even though I grew up in Nebraska, but my family had hunted out there. And I was just so struck by the beauty and the rawness of the place and the underlying currents of tension and the difficulties of living there, as well as how pristine the environment was. Three things began to move through me. And I didn't, well, two things really from the sand hills initially and I, and Rosebud reservation and Pine Ridge just, which sit in South Dakota, just above Nebraska there at the very top. And the first was I went to wounded me and it, it completely changed me, but I didn't know what to do with that material. I, it just sat there. And it made me think very deeply and, and feel. And then I was shown a ghost shirt in a little Catholic church and by a native woman and it was sitting in a drawer and she pulled it out and showed it to me. And it was just magical and powerful. And I, again, I didn't know what to do with this material. It just stayed with me for the next 14, 15 years. And I knew one day I would write something that brought these materials together, but I didn't know what it was going to be. And then I heard a story about my sister had told me about a cattle ranching family that had this tradition of taking the young, the oldest son and giving him to the grandfather to raise in a really harsh Spartan environment so that he, that child would be prepared to take over the running of this very large ranch. And that's the story of the Bennett families that I eventually settled on. And when I heard that story, I felt it click into place almost like a key in a lock or the right combination. And the three pieces came together and I realized I would tell this story. Said, you know, from 1890 to 1900, and that it would be the story of this Sandhills family and a wounded knee and the repercussions of the two families that occur and the way they come together and the violence that happens. And I see even now the two cultures, the white and the native cultures living side by side uneasily in that part of the country as they do in other parts. So that was the way the story began for me. And as soon as I put those three pieces together, I saw this opening scene and this usually when I began a novel, and this is my sixth novel, I usually throw out the opening, say 50 to 100 pages. So this is one of the few times I've kept the opening. And because it was always here, this was always the opening, the last day of JB Bennett's life. And I was really scared to write a story where the main character dies immediately because that's not very encouraging or inviting, but it's a mystery who's killed him and why and why is he found with a Native American, young Native American girl next to him. And what does this all mean? And so I'm just going to read you the beginning of chapter one. It was mid-morning in early May when JB Bennett crested the hill, stopped and surveyed the little Sandhills meadow where the windmill was slowly clinking in a wobbly circle. The metal rubbing on metal in an uneven cadence made him reach for the small tin of grease in his saddlebag, the one he already knew he'd pulled out yesterday and left sitting on the window ledge in the tool shed when he'd repacked his saddlebags for the trip to his father's ranch this morning. It was getting to be harder to keep track of every little detail. He wasn't that old, he reasoned, but then he had the boy in the 20,000 acres and the men in the cattle. He lifted his hand and let it drop back to the saddle horn. It was the other thing that drove his mind these days. He reached in his shirt pocket and pulled out the photograph. He'd recovered from his son's dresser drawer a few hours ago. God only knew where Hayward had disappeared to. The picture showed his wife, Dulcenea, as she'd been in 1880 when she came to Nebraska, fresh faced and fiercely happy. Her long, all-burn hair barely contained by a ribbon, her hands shading her eyes as if she could see as far down the years as it would take to find him again and punish him for what he'd done. The wind was blowing so hard that day, he remembered praying that she wouldn't notice the fine grit from the sandhills that found its way into every crevice and seasoned your food. That night as they lay out in their bedroll, she teased him about the sand between his toes after they made love. It wasn't their first time that it happened when they agreed to marry at her parents' home in Chicago. By the time they bedded their first night on their new ranch in a new land, her initial shyness was replaced by a light teasing. He found delightful. He grimaced now. When had he ever used that word? But that was her effect on him. She brought a new language with her and made it his. He wondered if his son Hayward would miss the picture of his mother. This one had been lovingly preserved, wrapped in a pale blue silk scarf that must have been hers. Embedded carefully in a stack of his old baby clothes. Hand me downs from his older brother, Cullen. JB couldn't even think Cullen's name without wincing. While the staggering wine clank of the windmill seemed to grate harder on his ears. Today he was determined to find Cullen and bring him home. His father drum be damned. He gathered the reins in his fist and the young chestnut horse lifted its head and pawed impatient with the handkerchief. Cullen's mother, who paused too long. That's the way the novel and the story begins. By the end you'll find out everything you need to know about how he met his end and about the great love story. That is between the Dulcinea and JB and then between the families that are involved and their love of the land. Because that's something that keeps going on. I'm going to go around and talk to book groups, et cetera. At libraries I'm going to talk a lot more about the backgrounds of these stories and how it all came to be. Yeah. Josh, can you tell us a little bit about your background as far as what you do and how you became a writer? Yes. I grew up in Brownsburg. I grew up in Nebraska. I have a degree in English and creative writing. I'm a Ph.D. from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Which is now Binghamton University. They lost the State University of New York. I always thought that was kind of cumbersome. I came back to Nebraska to teach at the University of Nebraska in 2000. Before that I had taught for 22 years up in Minnesota in St. Paul at a women's college there. I also taught three years at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor in their MFA program. Right now I teach in our undergraduate and graduate program. We offer graduate degrees, Ph.D. included in creative writing. Our students write books to get a better understanding of what is going on. It's been a lot of fun. I love it. I've gone around the country teaching workshops and researching. My books mainly, I decided very early on that I would write books about the Midwest, set in the Midwest that involved all three places I had lived growing up. That was Iowa, Missouri, and Iowa. I thought I would write three in Nebraska, two in Missouri, and only one poor, sad novel. I don't know that I will ever get back to Iowa. I thought I would write three books in each place and I was going to be free to do whatever I wanted. I don't know whether I will get all this done. That's my life goal. I write short stories. I write horses. My husband is a writer. He works at Creighton. We write screenplays together. We are trying to write a novel. We have been trying to write a mystery novel together for a long time. It's comic. Maybe that's the problem. We were really getting going and then the pandemic hit. It hasn't been really funny since then. It's been a little scary. I just scrambling after that to stay afloat. Not coming up with many one-liners, I guess. Other questions? Anything else? No questions. A comment that when you are after reading the intro to the novel. Very powerful beginning. Oh, good.  I think yes. Yeah, thank you.  I'm sorry. I apologize when I kill off characters. You kind of hate to start with that kind of thing. The story goes where it wants to go. It really does. It does. I was just doing a book club the other night and I think people were surprised that I said, yeah, I turned my story over to the characters quite often to find out what else they have to tell me and what else they feel. So it's a very organic process. I don't have a big plan to begin with and I let it lead me to see where we're going to go. And the hardest characters in this novel, one of the hard ones was the child Cullen, who when we meet him, he's like 17, 18 years old. And he's a very dark character who's had a very, very hard life. And his grandfather, he's a man of his own, he's been a great character in the world. And I think in some way, how, how in the world they had their drum also a difficult character. But once I began to ask them what do you, you know, try to figure out what, who they were beneath all of that, because I think we're all so complex. The revelations were very I'm not, I'm just right there. No, I'm working around it. In this book there were people who hadn't finished it yet.  So they'd be able to finish it without having it ruined. Oh, I have a friend who reads the endings, the ending of every book to see if she'll find it worthwhile to read it. She reads that first. It's like, what kind of thinking is it?  The ending isn't the whole book, though. Yeah, that's true. She doesn't like the tension of waiting, I think. So she knows how it's going to end. She can read it. Everybody reads differently. Okay. I know. I know. I tease her about it. Well, we're going to move on a little bit to how you can be involved in the One Book, One Nebraska program and some of the resources that we offer for just our readers out there, but keep typing in your questions and comments and we'll get back to those as they pop up. So one of the things we offer is a website that readers can go to to get all kinds of information, both about the book, about Jonathan, about how they can be involved. I'm just going to pull that up really quick. And we've just got a lot of information on here. And on our Get Involved page, we have our social media connected. We also have it up at the top corner of every web page on here. So you can email us directly, find us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram, and see what other people are saying about the book. And we've just got some of our most recent posts up here that you can kind of flip through. We also have discussion questions listed, and those are actually ones that Janice wrote for us for the book specifically. So those are a great resource for whether you're in a book club group or just reading the book yourself. This is a great resource. Classrooms, however you're reading this book, we really encourage you to work through these questions. We also have the Facebook page where we encourage people to talk about the book, let us know what they think, tell us how they're reading it, who they're reading it with, and just be a little bit more involved in that conversation as well, talking about the book. We want this to be a conversation across the state, not just in your book club. So we would really love to hear your thoughts, and you can find that on Facebook One Book One Nebraska. And right now I'm going to hand things over to Erica a little bit so she can tell us about the Humanities Nebraska program that we have available to get Janice to your book club group. Yes, thank you Tessa. Janice has graciously agreed to be on the Humanities Nebraska Speakers Bureau, which means that Humanities Nebraska will help pay her stipend and mileage to attend meetings with your library or with your organization to talk about the book, to talk more about what she shared with us today. So Tessa, can we, there we are, there's our website, and the way to find this, you go to the Speakers Bureau, and then if you go to Speakers, just click on Speakers, and Janice is the second. It's alphabetical, so fortunately she has a name that ends with A, so she's easy to find on our website. You can go and there's a description, I think that's a bio of Janice, and then her program, Bones of Paradise, a novel examined, and her contact information is right there. And so the steps to book Janice G for or for your program is to contact her first. Just give her, send her an email to see if she is available, work at a date, work at a time with her, get that all confirmed and set first. And then after you get that confirmed with Janice, you can go back to our website and go to how to book a speaker. And if you forget the steps, we have the steps here. We also have the eligibility. And so to go through our Speakers Bureau, you need to be either a nonprofit organization or a library or a school or a university. So step one is to confirm it with Janice, and then we have an online application form. It's just a simple little one pager where you can give us the information about your event. And it's a $50 fee to Humane, Nebraska. But then as I said, we will pay Janice's, we'll pay her stipend and we'll also pay her mileage to get to your location. So it only costs the libraries or the universities just that $150 amount. That's right. Yep. Nice. Yeah. We do have a question. Can this be done remotely as well or in person or remote presentations? Well, that's a good question for Janice. What do you think? Oh, sure. Yeah. No, I'm fine with that. No problem at all. In fact, because of the current situation, I'm doing a lot remotely. Anyway, it just seems safer. And absolutely. And sometimes it's just easier for the book club. You know, they're meeting remotely. So it makes sense that yeah. And the other night when I was doing one, there were some people in the library and some people remotely. So we were doing a Zoom, a combined event and it worked well. It was fun. Yeah. And I'm used to this. It's not a problem for me. I enjoy it. I make people talk. Sorry. For online programs, you can still go through our speaker's bureau and we will still pay the stipend. So. Well, that's actually a very good deal to have that set up that way. Yeah. Nice. And we do some of this is thank you, Janice, for the discussion questions as well. Those have been very, it was always good to have those for the book discussion groups in this discussions that are happening. Yeah, Janice, can you talk a little bit about the program that you're offering through Humanity Nebraska? Well, I want to do several things. I'll give some background for the novel. As I mentioned, I'm going to elaborate more on the kinds of things that came into my work as my research, because a lot of research went into this book. When I'm writing historically or any of my novels, I do a lot of research. I like to do a lot of research in sight. And I'll also talk about writing how I became a writer a little more, you know, in greater detail. And I'll talk about the kind of themes and ideas that were at work here to bring these issues, the social issues, the issues of family and trauma, and the struggle for justice that is going on worldwide and that constantly goes on in our lives beginning with practically birth in a family. And then the various forces that are at work socially to kind of as we all vie for a place in the world and to have some sense of recognition and respect. And those are issues that I'm very interested in. And I also talk a little more about, as I mentioned, I'll talk a little more about the creative process, because that's something people are really curious about. And I also offer workshops that can accompany an appearance. I will do that with a book club if people want. I can, you know, we can do a whole day long event where we'll talk about the book. But I'll also offer a writing workshop if people are interested in that. And sometimes that's, that's, I have some approaches that really helped people who always thought they wanted to write, but didn't know whether they could write. They begin to introduce them to the process. And it's to kind of pull the curtain aside. And to help them understand, I have some, some prompts that work. I do a lot with very, I collect very old pictures that I get from junk stores and antique stores and, you know, those old photographs. And I use those to help stimulate stories and to discover characters. And people often discover something out of their own past or their own family history when we do this kind of exercise. So sometimes people begin to write memoirs or family histories. And sometimes they, they have stories that have been like, as, as occurs to in my life, stories that, that keep coming up that you, you know are your stories, but you don't know how to write them. And so sometimes I'll help them begin to write them and discover those stories. So yeah, it's a, it's, I kind of try to shape the experience to the group and what they have in mind and what they would like to have happen. Obviously if it's a school, it's a slightly different presentation, but probably more on the creative process too, because that's something that is really useful to all everyone in school and just to everyone. I teach a course in creativity impact, the capstone for our English major for the people who are involved in the arts. And so it's something I'm really engaged in. And I, I think it would, it'll work on a lot of different levels. So the, you know, I like that's, I'm glad they're going to contact me so that I can talk to them and find out exactly what they would like and what would suit their audience the best. And I actually have pictures. I got a power point. I'm just building it, but I have pictures now. I'm so excited because usually when I was going to book clubs, when the book first came out, I would drag along all these old photographs I have and pictures from Wounded Knee. There's a great book called Eyewitness at Wounded Knee and it's the University of Nebraska Press published it. And it was very, very useful. It continues to be useful because it gives a timeline about Wounded Knee, all of the printed historical reports, and then the photographs that were taken, which are pretty profound. I guess they're either profound or not. So pretty profound means is meaningless. I'm sorry. How about just profound? Profoundly moving. Okay. Yeah. Chris, do you have any questions? Yes. Well, I have one that just popped in here. Awesome. Want us to know, John, do you still teach at UNL? I know you were talking earlier about that. It wasn't sure. Yeah, I'm still at it. I don't know. They're going to have to drag me out of there and put me on a timey-dove horse and send me off. I'm still working. I only teach one course in the spring. And that's a PhD course in creative writing workshop. They're working on novels. So we'll be working on that this spring. In the fall, I'm going to teach my creativity course in the capstone. And I will also teach an undergraduate creative writing course in fiction. So yeah, I'm still teaching. It just seems to be what I wanted to do with my life. Well, I always wanted two things. I wanted to teach and I wanted to write. And I figured if I could arrange it so that they supported each other, it would really work out and it has. I feel very grateful. For years, I've been satisfied with work. And I know that, of course, knock on wood, that's a terrible thing to say that you're satisfied. But it's actually worked out. And I think that's important. It's helped. It's helped my writing.  I need to change careers. The only thing I've done to change careers is to move to a different place to do it. But that's good. And I was very surprised by coming home to Nebraska. I didn't see that in the future, so that was good. And that really worked. Well, my sister and I had bought some land out in the sandhills after I discovered it, the sandhills for myself. And I thought, well, but we only bought a couple of hundred acres. And when you understand the breadth of the sandhills, you understand that's like having a lot in a suburb. That's virtually, it's useless. Unless you're going to build a house there. But it was just so beautiful. It was on the Navarera River. And it was, we had, you know, river. And it was just lovely. But we neither of us, she's in California, neither of us got out there enough to really hang on to it forever. So we sold it. And it went back to somebody who was our neighbor. And so he, he got a bigger piece. So he doesn't feel like he's in a suburb. You never know where life will take you. Yeah. No, I know. But I thought, well, if I come back to Nebraska, I'll be closer to my land. And that, because one of my ideals, of course, I imagined I would move out there and live there because I love it so much. And, but like many of the things we love, it's better to visit. Yeah. I didn't know what I'd do out there. I couldn't commute to work. Unless you're going to be a rancher, cattle. Yeah. Yeah. Then you need thousands of acres. So you need 50 acres per cow calf pair, which that's why you could only have four cows on the land. This wasn't an enterprise that was going to go very far. I love that your program is so malleable that people can email you and you can really just customize your community's rest program to what they're looking for, whether that's some sort of writing workshop or, you know, just a straight book discussion about your work. Absolutely. I love that you're so flexible in that way. I wanted to talk a little bit about how we can get books into book club hands. So one thing we offer at the Nebraska Library Commission, our book club kit. And I'm going to just bring up our book club kit stage really quick. We have all the One Book One Nebraska titles available via our book club kit. And I'm just going to go ahead and search by last name. And here you can see all of Jonathan's books that we have available in our book club kit selection. So we don't just have Bones of Paradise, but we do have 50 copies available. We have the discussion questions here readily available for you guys. And it's a very easy process for you guys to check out books for a few weeks, a month at a time, depending on how long your book club likes to read something, and just be able to utilize the surface service from us. So I wanted to go over that a little bit. I believe we also, we said send sets of it to the regional library systems as well. Yes. So we're not the only one with book club kits. Our regional library systems also have book club kits. So you can check them out through them or through us. It really doesn't matter. However, we can get the book. When you want to, there's other places, there's other other options. Yeah. Right. So for the specific time you want to read it, if we're already two books up, check with your system. That's really good. We do have a question actually about having Jonas come to visit. So if I can jump into that. Alyssa wants to know if you're teaching in the fall, would it be more difficult to book you for a visit? Do you prefer summer or spring or any particular time? I rearranged my classes in the fall. So I will be more available. I teach in three hour blocks each week. So my two classes will meet once, they'll meet Monday and Tuesday nights. So I'm available Wednesday through Sunday basically. And yeah, just have to be back to teach on Monday and Tuesday nights. So pretty much any time of year is perfectly fine to, you know, whatever works in the library or the school it wants. Yeah. And this spring is the same thing. I teach in a three hour block on Tuesday afternoon. So I'm there. I'm available. Which is kind of nice. I've always taught in big blocks because particularly when you're teaching, working with somebody's fiction or poetry, you want that intense experience and you want them to be fully engaged. We often eat together. You know, we'll share some food and we just kind of, we just lock down and do it for three hours and it's good. We take a break. I give them a two minute break. Don't you think that's enough? All right, they get 10 minutes. Maybe 15 if I'm really not feeling it. So no, I'm available. I'm now, people have contacted me some and I've, you know, there's stuff happening in the summer, the spring. We haven't, yes, there's something in, you know, I've picked up a couple of dates in the fall too. So anytime just not those not Monday and Tuesday nights. Great. That was a great question. And I love that, yeah, you've been able to rearrange your schedule to be more flexible and be, yeah readily available for books. Yeah. No, I think it's a, yeah, this is very important.  There've been some public library in Omaha, where, which was my public library. I would walk there and, you know, just drag my whole armful of books as a little kid home. And that's when everyone walked. I don't know whether you remember that or not, but we did walk. And I'd be, I'd try to read a book while I was walking because it was so, I just loved the library and it just, I always think of libraries as saving my life. Even in high school, I would just hole up in the, on the floor in the corner of the central high in Omaha and the library and read poetry. That's what I discovered poetry. I became a poet first, by the way, and then turned to fiction. I just thought fiction took, it was too hard. It took too much time. I didn't have that. You know, I was a kid. I wanted to, I wanted something you could get your emotions right out there. So as my life got more emotionally complicated, and I discovered poetry and I just read and copied poems out of books for hours. And that for years, I carried around a book I made of poems that I had loved. And that was due to a library. And every place I've gone, I, everything I can do for libraries, I will do, you guys just save our lives all the time. And I know so many people who say that every, every writer says that or their idiots don't say that. Of course, they believe that because you guys are the people holding the books. This is great. We have to keep every, we have to keep libraries going. This is important. We have to keep people coming to libraries too. So the programming you do is so very, very important. And thank you for doing it. And we'll keep writing if you'll keep your doors open. That's a big thing. Absolutely. Yeah, good. Good. It's a deal. All right. Good. Good. One event that we do every year is the celebration of Nebraska books. And that's always in the fall. We haven't picked a date yet for this upcoming fall. So keep your eyes and ears open for that. But at the celebration, it's free and open to the public. And one thing is we always have that year's One Book One Nebraska author do a presentation. So, Janice will be there. She will be presenting for the One Book One Nebraska about her book. And then we'll also have Nebraska Book Awards and the Geshe and Bennett Awards that night.  So it's kind of a nice bookend to the program. And so that's one thing we like to put out there that that event will be coming this fall. And we really encourage you guys all to attend if you can if you're here in Lincoln, Nebraska. Okay, here's one thing we talked about a little bit at the beginning with Becky about nominating for One Book One Nebraska. So, like she said, the nominations closed June 15. But if you nominate on June 16, it just goes towards the next year's selection committee. And this can be found on the One Book One Nebraska website. It's very simple for you to submit Nebraska Center for the book or Center for the book dot Nebraska dot gov slash obon type and nominations dot ast. So we just want to know the book title, the author, your email just so we know who's nominating it and then why you think it's a great book for the One Book One Nebraska program. We can't select a book if it's never been nominated. So we really encourage you if you think there's a book out there that needs one of these criteria, nominate it so that it can get into our judges hands and they can have an opportunity to read it and consider it for the One Book One Nebraska program. So that is a question you have about somebody want to know about nominating. So it's good that we I knew we were going to get to this. I was waiting for this. So the only books that are ever put up to possibly be the One Book One Nebraska do come from nominations from citizens. No one on the committees or from Center for the Book or anything come up with the titles. You just wait for people to tell you what books they think might be good for it. Yes. It's really a people's not a people's choice, but it starts off as people's choice. Can we can we nominate more than one book using a different form for each book? Yes. Yeah. Because as you were saying that I thought I thought of two books I want to nominate. Well, should I get a friend to nominate one? Yeah. And it could be any genre could be poetry could be nonfiction fiction. Good. We had a book of poetry a few years ago actually. 2018. Yes. I'm sorry to interrupt Tessa, but yes, 2018 Nebraska presence, which was a collection of poetry was the One Book One Nebraska. And I would also like to interject two things while we're on this page if you don't mind. One is that these nominations should not be children's books or young adult books. That's these are for it sounds weird to say adult readers, but they are books that that would appeal to people at a reading level that would be defined as an adult level. And the other thing we talked about Nebraska author we talked about Nebraska theme Nebraska setting. But the third question here in print is really an important one, because over the years, we have had books nominated that were no longer in print. And if the book is not in print, it makes it almost impossible for the nominating committee to lay our hands on it to be able to read and consider it. And it also makes it that much more difficult for libraries to have access to it. So we would encourage people to be aware that this in print criterion is an important one for us to be able to bring the book to the state of Nebraska. Thank you, Becky. Yeah. Those are all great points. And I will mention, since you did mention about this being for adults that we at the library commission do actually have a separate program of one book for Nebraska kids and teens. If you are looking for something that is for the younger type readers, we do have that program. And we do the new book is chosen every year. And you can find that on our website. We didn't encompass that earlier as well this year. Thank you. That's all the program through the center for the book. And it's not a Nebraska, I mean, it's books that have been chosen by library staff here at the commission for we have a children's and a young adult novel chosen, but they don't necessarily have a Nebraska theme or setting in them there. We're just taking books that we think would be great reads for children that year. And we always have book tips available for those books as well. Yes, like Becky said, the one book one Nebraska program is specifically an adult book club brain program. That doesn't mean high school students or middle school students can read the book. But that's the last slide I have. And then here's my information. If you guys have questions about the one book one Nebraska program, please just let me know and we'll answer those for you. This is great. Let's see. Questions. Yeah, if anybody does have any questions, go ahead and any other questions type into the questions section, you go to webinar interface and answer them. I didn't know if we did briefly lose Christie there at the beginning. I didn't know if you wanted to say anything as well about the program and one book. Oh, I suspect you all covered it beautifully. Just that the Center for the Book loves this program. It is an honor to be a part of it. And we so appreciate the active authors that participate in all of the support from Humanities Nebraska to make it all possible and the Nebraska Library Commission, of course, because without all those partnerships, none of this would happen and it certainly would never have the reach that it does. So I guess I would just say thank you and please nominate those books, encourage your friends to nominate the books that they think are fabulous. And I know there are lots of people across the state that are looking forward to having John has come to their libraries to talk about this book or her other books and do writing workshops. So be another great year of One Book, One Nebraska. One last thing while we're waiting to make some questions to pop in. If you booked John for an event, shoot me an email, let us know so that we can post it on the One Book, One Nebraska event page. That way people in your surrounding communities might be able to come attend. If she's having an online event, we post that if she's doing a book signing or a bookstore event across the state, we want to know about it so that we can try to let everybody know about it that we can. So that's one thing I ask you guys to do is just submit those events so that we can get them on our page. Absolutely. I will add to that that when you book through the Speaker's Bureau, the Humane's Nebraska, we will also publicize your program through our weekly blasts and on our website to help people know about it too. That's really good. That's really helpful to get that kind of support. I hope people will do that. I will also send you both of you when I get some, when people contact me and I'm not sure who they're going through. People are just contacting me so I never know. They've always done that anyways. But I will start sending those too so that you'll know. Good. I don't see any questions, new questions yet. Anybody have any last minute desperate questions you want to ask of anyone about the program, about one book, one Nebraska Center for the Book or anything you want to ask Janice about her book, about the story. We can talk about that too. Well, I would like to make a comment. I've known Janice for a long time and have read several of her novels. And I've read The Bones of Paradise more than once. And when Janice was reading the first chapter about JB and the end of his life, what really struck me was that this is a book that, for me, when I finish reading it, the next thing I do is I go back and reread the first chapter because she's built this beautiful cycle. And so I would not be at all surprised to hear other readers over the year as they discuss this book talk about the fact that once they finish, what they most want to do is to go back and reread the beginning. And I think that's just a method in which readers are really going to be captivated by the story that she's telling. Well, that's wonderful news. Thank you. I like hearing that better than, yeah, I threw it away. I hated this book. I never wanted to hear another word of a book discussion that can make for an animated interesting discussion amongst the members, however. But that's true. And, yeah, as I was reading it, I was actually thinking, yeah, I did kind of get all of the, I got the beginnings of the themes that the tensions, the dramas that are going to be explored and played out in the novel are all in that opening. And I didn't know it when I was writing it. It was very intuitive. It came out of my unconscious, I'm sure. And my job then was to see if I could play those out throughout the novel, if I could explore each thing that suggested there. So thank you for finding that. And I'm impressed that you read the novel more than once, too. Absolutely, Janice. And as I said, I've read several of your books. Thank you. I'm very pleased. I'm your biggest fan. We do have a question. You mentioned the book club kits to borrow those. Is it available in other formats, like an e-book or audio book as well? It is. I know, well, I know it's an audio book. I imagine it's an e-book. I think it is. Yeah, is it an overdrive? I know when they did the audio book, the publisher said, okay, now here, we're going to send you three examples or samples of readers. And the one they first sent me was this guy with a kind of Western drawl, kind of like, you know, gun smoke or something. Because they thought, oh, it's a Western. I said, no, nobody from Nebraska ever sounded like that. And no, we're not doing that. And, you know, kind of a tough guy. Someone didn't say actually it is available in our Nebraska overdrive group. Yes. So if you remember, yes, so it is available. It's both an audio book and an e-book in Nebraska overdrive. Good. Good. I got there. And I'm so glad you made that choice, John, because make a great book for an audio book. It was so, it was coming. Well, you know, when you deal with New York, God love them.  Yeah, one day I'll tell people about, and I do talk about this, the time I brought my agent. Oh, no, it was my editor. I brought her out to the Sandhills in January and late December, early January. And that was an experience.  It's completely, beautifully quiet and pristine. And she was, I just pulled the car over and stopped at a, you know, where there was nothing. And she was kind of scared because she grew up in Manhattan. This was really terrifying to her. And I enjoyed it. She used to yell at me about having my characters drive around in pickup trucks too much. She said, they need to go, why are they driving so much? And so then she finally understood. She didn't know how to drive a car, but she had never learned how to drive a car because if you're in New York City, you don't drive. And so for her, the characters driving around in pickups seemed bizarre. Like I had some strange obsession. I understand that, yes, I'm actually originally from New York. Oh, are you? There you go. Upstate New York, Saratoga Springs. Oh, yeah. When I moved here 20 years ago, while I visited here first and in Lincoln in the city, it was fine. As soon as I left, it was a little agoraphobic. The open spaces were just, you read about it, you see pictures. It's not the same as sitting there and saying, how far away is that farmhouse? No. But now, you grow to love it. Yes, the open, the expanse and everything. It's, everything is different. You know, in New York, we have mountains and forests, but we have the open spaces and it's all, they're both good. Yeah. I loved upstate New York. Loved it. And Saratoga Springs is just incredibly beautiful. It really is. All right. And we do have a comment from someone. I was wondering about this too. Our regional library systems do have grants sometimes. And specifically, this one, she's in the Three Rivers Library System, but the others may well, grants for humanities Nebraska speakers. So if your library or school can't afford or doesn't have that $50 to bring someone in, look to your regional library systems to see if they have grants that they would be able to give you for that. And here, right now, our grants have been awarded already, but through the library commission, we would do that as well. If someone submitted a grant application just for either, well, for the youth ones, for some of the team books or our library improvement grants or something, programming type stuff, could be something you could apply for as well. Next year. Yeah. Good. For future reference. But yeah, look to your regional systems now and see if they can help you with any of the costs that might be involved. All right. We just hit 11 o'clock, but if anybody has any, we don't get cut off right now. If anyone has any other questions, any other comments they want to make, go right ahead. We did just a few other comments saying, thank you, everyone. Can't wait to read it. People haven't gotten to reading it yet. They're very excited. Good. I think people every year are always waiting to see what is going to be the one book and want to know what it's doing, going to be and making plans. Yeah, I was so excited about Becky texting me as soon as it was announced. I was helping with the band competition and I wanted to know what was going to be one book one Nebraska. Yeah. Yeah. No, I was saying I was utterly surprised. I had no idea this was happening. So it was a perfect, a lovely, uplifting moment to what has been just not a very good year 2021. Thank goodness we're done with that. And I'm hoping 2022 will begin to move into the positive soon. Soon, soon. Yes. Yeah. No, good. But at least we have books. We can, we can just hold up and read fiction. I've done so much. Sometimes I read a book every two days now. You know, sometimes every day, my father always read a book a day. So it was, he was insane. He was a very fast reader, but he could remember it all too. See, that's my problem if I read very fast. Yeah, I can get through it. Do I remember it? Parts a little, I don't know. So I'm really looking forward to meeting everybody. I love driving around. That's driving around any places my favorite activity. And I've been locked down with the pandemic, which has been kind of scary because, you know, you're just sitting there looking at the dogs and they're looking at you. And you're deciding which is going to eat you first. But aside from that, yeah, so I can hardly wait for things to loosen up and we can get out on the road again. I can go from there excited to have you come to either good or remotely, which either way. Yeah, absolutely. Awesome. Are there any other questions coming in any other last words from everybody? Sounds so dramatic, but encouraging final thoughts. I think we can wrap it up for today's show. Thank you everybody for joining us today. Thank you, Becky and Christie and Erica, all for being here with us for our annual intro to the One Book One Nebraska. Reach out, schedule your sessions, get your books in hand and start reading. I'm going to pull presenter control back to my screen. There it is. Okay. There we go. All right. And wrap things up. So that wrapped up for today's show. This is our session page for here and Tessa was showing lots of the websites and we have them all linked from our session page here. So One Book Nebraska, Community Nebraska Center for the Book, Celebration of Nebraska Books. So all of those are on there for you to be able to jump to all of them from the page here. This is our main Encompass Live page for their upcoming shows. But I said I would show you here is where our archives are listed underneath the upcoming shows. Those recent ones at the top of the page. So today will be here. Should be done and available tomorrow sometime as long as go to webinar and YouTube cooperate with me. Everyone attended today's show and registered for today's show will get an email from me letting you know when the recording is ready. We will have a link to the recording on our YouTube channel, a link to Tessa's slides. So if you haven't wanted to look at those and then of course all the links that are built in there. As you can see here, we do have a search feature. If you do want to look for any of our previous shows, you can search through here and we do have our, we had mentioned the one book from Nebraska Kids and Teens. We did a show, did a show last August about the 2021 and the 2022 titles. So if you're interested in those, you can watch that and access the information about the Kids and Teens program that we have through here through the library commission. But while we're here on this search, you can search our show full show archives or just the most recent 12 months you want something just recent.  Going back to the very beginning when Encompass Live premiered in January 2009. So we're going on like 12 years of archives here. So just pay attention to do watch any recordings to the original broadcast date to the all of a date there. Many of the shows will stand the test of time and still be good useful information, but some things will become outdated. Services or programs may have changed drastically. They may no longer exist anymore. Links may be broken. Such pages have moved. So just pay attention when you're watching any of our previous shows. We also do have a Facebook page for the show. If you do like to use Facebook, you can give us a like over there. We give reminders to your reminder to log in to today's show, highlighting our speakers. We'll let you know when recordings of previous shows are available. So if you do like to use Facebook, you can use that. Also, we use the hashtag Encompass Live, wherever we post on social media. Twitter, Instagram. I think that's all we're doing now so far, right? Twitter, Instagram, Facebook. Yeah. All the places that we reach out. So you can follow us there as well. So, yeah, get over here. So, I'm going to get back to the page. There we go. All right. So that wraps up today's show. Look for my email with information about today's recording. Just one last little information I want to share is our Big Talk from Small Libraries is our online conference for small libraries. It's going to be held February 25th. This year, it's always the last Friday in February, but the call for speakers is open through this Friday. So if you have something you would like to share and you're a small library with an FTE of 10,000 or less, that's who we generally try and keep to on the show. This is speakers from actually small libraries, all types, public, academic, school, anything. Get your proposal into me by this Friday and you might be able to be on our Big Talk from Small Libraries annual conference. This is the 11th annual conference of this. So just want to remind people to send in your proposals. And then that wraps it up for today's show. Hopefully you see I've got some open dates here. This is our schedule at the moment. I'm working on filling in some dates and stuff. So keep your eye on here for other shows coming on and what the topics are going to be. Other than that, thank you so much for being here with us this morning. Go out and read Bones of Paradise and talk about it with all your friends and family and everyone. Yeah. Good. Thank you so much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.


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I started the recording, so we're live, also for the people that watch it back on Moodle. So there was a question by Risfan. I like the GIFs. Will you say something about when and where you upload the PPT and task homework? So the assignments and the lecture, the PowerPoint and stuff I will upload today. So you can start directly after the lecture. The recording will not include the GIFs. So if you want the funny GIFs, you have to come to the Twitch lecture. So that's kind of the stick that I have to force you to do it. Oh yeah, sure, sure. I will make a note and I will upload them beforehand. Alright, yeah. No, that's easier for you guys. The lectures will also be saved by Twitch, so you can watch them back for 14 days, I think, after which they get automatically deleted. One of the nice things about watching the lectures on Twitch is that you also get the chat on the side. So the local recording doesn't have the chat, so that's why I kind of read out some of the questions so that when people watch it later on Moodle, they can also know what the question was that I'm answering. Alright, so the look and feel of R, this is how it looks on my Windows 7 machine. This is how it looks currently on my machine. So I'm using just the standard R. I'm generally not using the RStudio. Although if you want to use RStudio, that's fine with me. I generally use a system where I use R and I just use Notepad++. So this is my programming window and then here I have the execution of the program because I like to keep those two things separate. The reason why that is is because originally I started programming in C. What is the difference between R and RStudio? There is no difference. RStudio is a shell around R and that's all it is. It has a built-in text editor, but I don't like the text editor in RStudio because I like Notepad++. It has syntax highlighting and brackets and these kinds of things. I think the newer versions of RStudio have that as well. General Gulak, would you recommend RStudio for us beginners? No, I would actually advise against using RStudio. RStudio is easy in a way because it has this additional window where you can see which objects are loaded and you can load libraries by just clicking on it. The main issue that I have with RStudio is that it makes it really easy to create scripts which are not reproducible because if you click on loading a library, then you generally don't type in that you need to load the library. Can we use RStudio? Yes, of course. You can use RStudio. You could use R in the command line if you want. Programming in R is nothing more than writing a text document. It's just writing something like, okay, so I want to load a certain library, for example, a library that allows me to do QTL mapping, then I want to set my working directory somewhere, so I want to go somewhere on my hard drive, for example, in the D drive, and then I am going to read something, so I'm going to use read table to load in data.csv or something, right? And then I have to say separator equals comma because it's a comma separated file. The thing is, is that in RStudio you can load something by just clicking and dragging it, but then it's not in the script, and one of these things about programming for scientific work is that everything needs to be reproducible, and what I generally do is I type the script that I want, and then I just do Ctrl A, Ctrl C, then I switch to R, and this of course will create errors because I don't have a file which is called data.csv, and then I just paste it in, and then of course it will give me an error because this file doesn't exist, but that's the way that I do programming, and this forces me to keep the script in such a way that it will kind of run from beginning to end without any errors. And RStudio, it has its advantages, especially for beginners, because you can go back and forth when you have multiple plots, and you can click on loading a library, but this makes so that you can create scripts which are not... By writing a script, I always include the library like in LaTeCh. Yeah, yeah, yeah, and the thing is you need to write down which libraries you load, and in RStudio you can just click these libraries, and then it can even save these, so next time that you start RStudio it already loaded those libraries, so you're not going to add that to your script, so in a way it forgets the dependencies, right? If you move to another computer, which has a different setup of RStudio, it might be that your script is now starting to produce errors because you did not load the library that you require, and that's why I generally advise people to start with just using a basic text editor, something like Notepad++, and the nice thing about... For didactic reasons, kind of. Generally RStudio is really good when up until you reach a certain point, but could you not control that by using Anaconda? Yeah, but then you're using an extract, and then your scripts will only work when people have Anaconda installed, and it's not reproducible, right? Reproducible research means that you have a script, you have data, and by having these two things you can run the whole analysis, so there's a... And one of the nice things about Notepad++, which I love to use, especially under Windows, is that you have like, bracket highlighting. So if I select the bracket, it will highlight the corresponding one. So if I make a mistake and close this one, which is not opened, then now I directly know, because it doesn't highlight... So I know that I've missed the bracket somewhere. Why Notepad++? That's kind of irrelevant. You can use any text editor, just don't use the standard Notepad that comes with Windows because that one's really, really poor, and doesn't support these things. One of the nice things is, is that if I would save this file, let me save it somewhere, and I say script.r, and just save it here. Whoa. Yeah, yeah, yeah, just save it there. It will also highlight keywords. So it will color keywords that it recognizes, and it will color also things like the start and the end of a string. But yeah, there's many ways to do r, and the nice thing about doing it in a separate text editor is that when you start using external computers, so for example, you have a script which uses like a lot of memory, or requires you to have like 30 CPU cores, then you can easily copy-paste the script into a terminal window, and run the script on another computer, and not your local machine. And that is where things like RStudio really start becoming a drawback.  That's programming, so you have to find the structure that works best for you. But the structure that works best for me is just having a separate script where I type my code, and then copy-pasting it into R. And then once I copy-pasted it, I actually close R to make sure that I don't have variables floating around. And this happens, for example, when you do something like x equals 5, and then hey, you now have like 30 or 40 additional lines of code, and then you start using x. At that point, it might be that it's saved in your session or other problems. So in my mind, scripts are different from data, so scripts are written in the text editor. Data is either made by Excel files or other text files, or like getting it online. So I try to keep these things separate. Not only that, but when I make a script, I always put in a header. So I always say something like this, so a script as an example on how to create a script. And I always add something like Denny Arans 2021, Berlin. And I add a copyright sign in front, so just that people know who did it, when it was done, and which company or which thing I worked for. And this is of course, do you need to close, or is there also clear command? There actually is a clear command. So you can use, remove all objects, which is the command this. And this thing is good to always put as the first line, because then it clears the entire R session of everything that there is, and then you start off with a fresh R session. So you don't have to close it every time, but I generally tend to close it. And that's just to kind of prevent things which are from an older session or from another script. Because when you're working on big projects, you might have like five or six different scripts, which you run one behind another. And then of course, like my scripts, or when I think about good scripts, it starts by loading the libraries, setting where you are on your computer, so the working directory, loading in data. And then generally, the last line of my script is something like a write table, where I write out the data after I've done all my manipulations. And that is kind of the way that I work. And I found that this works very well, especially if you, because it forces you to write down everything that you do. So I treat programming as having a lab book, where you write everything down, that's the script.  So this is my lab book, and this is my experiment. And that's kind of how I try to separate those two. But of course, if you want to use RStudio, because you think that the editor in RStudio is much nicer, then be my guest. I've seen people program R in different environments as well, and they are pretty good programmer. All right, thanks for the explanation. Could you suggest a good alternative for Notepad Plus Plus for Mac? It's in the lecture at the end. Let me look it up, because it used to be called Text Wrangler. But I think it got renamed to BB Edit. Let me check. Yeah, it's now called BB Edit. So for Mac, use BB Edit. And if you're on Linux, then use whatever you want. Like, if you're capable enough to install Linux on your own, then you don't need any advice for me on what kind of a text editor to use. So BB Edit for Mac. Should be free, so no problem, Giorgio. All right, so let's, what about Jupyter Notebooks? Really useful. I know some people who are massive fans for Jupyter Notebooks. And it works really well, because it also forces you to write documentation. Jupyter Notebooks, you used to have similar things in R, which was called SWEVE. And that is, then you make a latech type document. So latech is a markup language, like HTML. And SWEVE allowed you to put the text so you can just write text. And then you can do an R computation, and then only show, for example, the figure that comes out. And SWEVE allowed you to go and have some text and some R code and then directly generate a PDF. But like I said, you're free to use what you want. And in the end, it doesn't really matter, because you're always talking to the R interpreter. And the R interpreter doesn't change. It doesn't matter if you use Jupyter Notebooks, or if you use RStudio, or if you use R. What is the source to download Notepad++? I always just Google Notepad++ download. And then it's the first, it's HTTPS notepad-minus-minus-plus.org. And get the 64-bit release, just so that it can handle like massive files. I can put the link in the chat, probably. Thank you, moderator. That's why we have a moderator to do these kinds of things. All right, let's switch back to the lecture, so that we don't spend like hours on the first lecture. So this is the look and feel. Depending on what you use might look very different, but it always consists of these two essential part. One of them is the console. So the console is where you can talk to the R interpreter. And you have your graphic device, which shows things like plots, or heatmaps, or whatever you want to visualize. And this is what I mean by one of the advantages of R. R has built in graphics. So the graphics, they are built into R, and R understands what a figure is, and what the x-axis is, or the y-axis. So it knows this, and it's built into the programming language. All right, so let's start some first basic programming, right? So we can use R as a basic calculator. So if I type in 1 plus 4, it will tell me 5. So I can show you a little bit of an example of that. So let's clear the window, just so that we don't have the... Yeah, why not? Just do it like this, right? Then you can't see the error anymore. So hey, if I would type in 4 plus 1, it will say 5. So hey, you can use R as a... Can you repeat the notepad plus plus version? It depends on which computer you are using, but there is, I think, a 32-bit and a 64-bit. And nowadays, people almost always have a 64-bit computer. This allows you to use more memory. So if you have a file, which is one gigabyte big, then the 32-bit version will not open it, while the 64-bit version will allow you to open it, because it's just bigger. But I have a Firefox window here as well, so we can go to the download. And then you just say, well, I want to have the latest release, of course, and then here it automatically defaults to the 32-bit version. You don't want the 32-bit version. You want to have the 64-bit version. Of course, this depends on your operating system. But the operating... If you're on Windows, it will tell you that 64-bits is not supported by your system. So you can't install the wrong version, and the 32-bit version will work on a 64-bit Windows as well. So you can just get the installer, double-click, next, next, next finish, and then you've it installed. All right, so let's move back. So just a basic calculator. So the R interpreter understand basic mathematics. Remember that the decimal separator in R, so separating like whole numbers from fractions of a number, is always the period in R and never the comma. So 5 comma 3, although in Europe this is very common to do, right? It uses the American system. So it's 5.3 for 5 and 3 tenths. There are some special operators, like if you want to do the exponent, then you can do 5 and then this square heading 2, or you can do 5 multiply, multiply 2. And this is then 5 to the power of 2, which is 25, of course. It supports Euclidean division and the Euclidean division remainder. These are always difficult for people, but Euclidean division and Euclidean division remainder occur a lot in computer science, and there's a next slide which will explain what the Euclidean division is and what the Euclidean division remainder is. R also has some special numerical constants. So you can have inf, which stands for infinite, and there are two types of it. There's positive infinity and negative infinity. You have NaN, which is not a number. So when you are trying to convert the letter c into a number, then it will say NaN, not a number. And R understands what a missing value is. So Na, the Na value is a missing value, and this is significant when you do statistics. If you do statistics, then the statistics change based on missing values. If you calculate the mean, then the mean is based on summing up all the numbers divided by the number of numbers. If you have a missing value, then R can deal with that. So instead of having five values and a missing value, so it will recognize that there's a missing value and do divide by six instead of divide by five. So hey, it knows that a value can be missing. Na's propagate. So if you do something which results in an Na, then having an Na plus something will still be Na. And this is kind of a safety thing so that when you are dealing with missing values, you as a programmer are forced to properly handle missing values, which is really nice. And not all programming languages have this, especially the NaN is not very common. And something like C cannot have integer values being missing. Floating point values have their own missing, but integers cannot be missing, but in R they can be missing. So it understands what a missing value is. All right, so Euclidean division. I don't know if people had this, but Euclidean division is very similar to long division, which when I was in elementary school and in high school, we were taught to do divisions this way. I know that nowadays they don't do this anymore. But imagine that we want to divide 100 by 39, right? Then how I was taught to write this down is say, well, we have 39, which is the divisor, then we have 100. So that's the number that we want to divide and we put these brackets around it. And the example would be better when we had 1000. But what you do is you try to say, well, one is not divisible by 39. 10 is also not divisible by 39. 100, you can divide by 39. And 39 fits into 100 two times, right? So what you would do is you would then write down the two here. And two times 39 is 78. And then when you subtract 78 from 100, you get 22. And the two, so the amount of times that 39 fits wholly in 100 is called the Euclidean divisor. And 22 is what remains after doing this division. Is that clear? I hope so. It comes back a lot in computer science. It's not something that you would be confronted with the first two or three lectures, but it is something which is relatively, it comes back a lot. For some reason in computer science, you often work with Euclidean division and not floating point division, right? Floating point division would say two points something. But in this case, you want to know how often something is in the number wholly. And when you do that, how much is left? There are more things which are built into R. So there are built in character constants. So letters in R are the 26 uppercase letters of the Roman alphabet. So you have letters written with small letters, and those are the 26 lowercase letters of the Roman alphabet. R understands what a date and a time is. It also understands what a month is. It knows that January is the first month and February the second month. So month.abb is the three letter abbreviations for the English month names. And if you want to have the full name of the month, you can use month.name. Furthermore, R has a whole bunch of built in constants, things like pi and E, and these kinds of kind of magical numbers. And pi, I hope that everyone knows that two times pi times R is the circumference of a circle. And so pi is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to its diameter. So two times pi times R is actually pi times the diameter. So you can do circle calculations and these things as well. One of the things that I want to point out here, because I saw that in the assignments, it often goes wrong. So letters is just a vector. So if I want to know what, for example, the 16th letter is of the alphabet, I can just do this. So I can use the square brackets to select from a vector. So here from the vector letters, I select the 16th letter, which is the letter P, capital, because I'm using capital letters. So remember that these built in constants are just vectors. We will come back to two vectors during the rest of the lecture, but so that you know that you can select from them just like you can select from any vector in R. R also support imaginary numbers. So in case you are doing things with springs and spring constants, then using imaginary numbers is necessary to calculate some stuff. It doesn't support it directly. So if I ask R what the square root of minus one is, it will say that the square root of minus one is not a number. But if I ask for the square root of minus one plus zero imaginary part, then it will say that oh, the square root of minus one is I. So it understands imaginary numbers and it allows you to compute with imaginary numbers. And this is very useful when you are doing mathematics, which goes into things like spring constants. So if I have a spring with a little weight on there and I pull it and it goes up and down, then to calculate the dampening of the wave, you need to use imaginary numbers. So it can understand that, but you have to force it. So you have to be explicit that you want to use it. So normally it will say, no, it's not a number, but you can do this. It supports all basic trigonometry functions like sine, cosine, tangent, R cosine, R and these kinds of things. And it can do logarithms. So the thing that you have to remember is that normally we would write ln of five for the natural logarithm. So log five is two point something. So you use the two point something base. So the natural logarithm. So the E value. If you want to have a base 10 logarithm of five, you have to explicitly say the log 10 of five. So this is a little bit confusing because many people on your pocket calculator, it has a button which has log and then the log button is the log 10 and it has a button which is called ln and this ln button is the natural logarithm. So in R, the log is actually the natural logarithm. If you want to have the log base 10, then you have to type in log 10 of five. And the inverse, of course, is called xp for exponent, which is e to the power of one in this case. So if you want to have e to the power of 15, you can just type xp15. And it will come back later on. It's not that important now. It's just that you know and that you get a little bit familiar with all the options. So imaginary numbers are supported, trigonometry is all supported, and logarithms are also supported. Operator precedence. So the order of operations is very similar to normal mathematics. We first do exponents and roots, then we do multiplication and division and then addition and subtraction. And it follows the standard PEMDAS system. There's probably a German version of the PEMDAS. So in English you get taught that PEMDAS are please excuse my dear Anne Selly. So this stands for power, exponents, multiplication, division, addition, subtraction. And question to you guys. If I have this 10 minus three times two, what is the answer of this? These are these things that you see on Facebook, right? Your aunt on Facebook does these things. All right, so four, four, four, four, good. Yeah, that's pretty good. So no one comes up with 14. Like on Facebook, like 50% of people just fill in 14 for some reason, because they don't understand operator preference.  All right, so that's how this works. You can always overwrite operator precedence by using brackets. So if I really want to do the minus first, then I would say round bracket open, 10 minus three, round bracket close times two, and then it will first do the, so you can always override it. Short break. So we're a little bit behind. So I will try and speed up a little bit. But so there's a lot of things in R. So in R, when you start R, you start a session. And the session is something that is, that is holding everything that you load. In R, everything that you load goes into your RAM memory. So if you have a computer, which has four gigabytes of RAM, then you can only load in four gigabytes of data in R. And this is one of these drawbacks of R, is that it is like Google Chrome, it will eat your memory, and it will eat your memory quick. And depending on which version of R you installed, you have a certain amount of memory that you can use. And this is also dependent on your, this is also dependent on the data that you load. So the size of the data, the type of the data. So characters take a little bit more than, for example, integers. But remember that everything is in your random access memory. There are some functions that you can use to manage your session. So you can do get working directory. And this will tell you where you currently are on your hard drive. You can do there, which will give you the files, which will give you the files that are there. So hey, I can go to my D drive and I can ask which files are located here. If I want to move to another position on my hard drive, so to a different folder or to a different different hard drive, I can use the set working directory. And the ls function shows you which variables are currently loaded in your session. So let me give you a small and quick example of that. So when we go to the R session, I can define, for example, something like x, right? And I can set my working directory to be on my D drive. Now I'm at my D drive and now I can do something like deer. And this will show me the files that are there. So there's a recycle bin. I have a backup of the USB stick of Gudrun that I got. I have a recycler, which is similar to the recycle bin. And I have some kind of a text file here. Then I have two folders called D drive and E drive, and I have a recovery folder, right? So I can also go into these folders by setting my working directory, for example, like this. And now when I do a deer, you can see what is there. So I have like several folders. One is called for Manuel. I have like a G big folder and like a so and these kinds of things. If I want to know which variables I have already defined, I can use the ls function. So when I use the ls function, I see that there's one variable defined and this variable is called x. I can of course define more variables. So I could define y being seven, and then I can define seven being nine, right? And now when I do ls, it shows me that I have three variables defined called x, y, and z. So the ls shows you what is in your session. The deer shows you what is on the hard drive. If I want to know where I am on the hard drive, I can do a get working directory. And this will show me I'm at the D hard drive in Windows. And then I'm in the folder called D drive. The reason why I have D and E separated is because of historical reasons. So don't worry about that. In your hard drive, it will look different. If you want to install a package, you can use the function install.packages. For example, the QTL package for quantitative trade locus mapping. But like I said, there are more than 4000 packages in the standard R repository. There are literally hundreds of thousands of packages for R, which are created. And during the lecture series, we will actually create our own package as well. Installing a package does nothing. It just gets it from online, installs it on your computer, and makes it available. But it doesn't load it. It doesn't bring the functions that are inside of the package into the session. If you want to use something from this QTL package, for example, you first have to load it. So you say library QTL. And here, you don't have to put the brackets surrounding it to the double quotes. But you could put the double quotes here as well. And this will make the package available. So any function which is given to you by this package will now be available in R. It is not available until you load or until you do the library call. You can save an object in an R data format. So it's much smaller or it's smaller on your hard drive. Like if I have a big text file, which is two gigabytes big, then when I load it into R, R will have an internal representation which might be much smaller than the original text representation. So I can save that object in case I want to load it later. I can say save, then the name of the variable containing the object. And then I can say, save it to, for example, your dot R data or my dot R data, or I can just give it any name. I can save everything. So I can save the whole environment, right? So in my environment that I had here, I have x, y and z. So I can save one object. So I can say, save the x object and call this or put this in a file called x dot R data. And I could save everything using save dot image. And now save dot image will save x, y and z. If I would now clear my session, I think we had the clear session somewhere. So if I remove everything from the session, now nothing is loaded. If I now just type load, and I type load x dot R data. Now, if I do an LS, it now loaded back in x, y and z. And the values that we put in there are still in there. So it's an easier way to kind of, hey, if imagine that you're programming and someone calls you that your house is, well, not your house, but the house of your friend is on fire. So you have to leave now. Hey, then you can just save dot image, give it a file name and run out of the door. And then everything is saved.  If you want to quit, you can use like the button here to quit the R session. But if you are writing scripts, then you have to quit the session. But if it's called both, yeah, well, I just overwrote the file, right? So I wrote the same file twice. I once wrote x dot R data containing only x, and then I overwrote the file. So that, yeah, I could have given it a different name, should have given it a different name. Q with no will quit the R session and not save the workspace. This is one of these things that I always hammer on is never, ever save your default workspace. If you want to save your workspace or you want to save the whole environment, you use save dot image. If I would go, I don't know if you guys can see that, but when I click this button here, no, you don't see it will, it will put up one of these questions and it will save workspace image, question mark, and then it gives you three options. Yes, no, and cancel. If you if you click the yes button, then it will save a hidden file in your my documents folder called dot R data. The next time that you start are it will load everything which is in this hidden file, which can be really annoying because if I just, if in my session I have four gigabytes of data, and I click save workspace image and I click yes, then the next time that I start are it will take me half an hour for R to start up because it's loading in all these four gigabytes of data and only then is it available. So my advice to you is never save your workspace using the kind of question that it poses to you. Save workspace image, no, and that's why in the slide here, when I do queue, so when I call quit, I always say no, don't save the workspace. And this again comes in with the repeatability of research and the fact that by saving the workspace, stuff keeps floating around which you don't want to have floating around. Is there a way to make to check whether this has happened? Yes, if you open up your R window and you type LS, then it should show nothing. So it should be more or less empty, right? So if I would go to my R window, right, and I would do LS, now you see that I have stuff loaded. So this means that it saved this sneaky file. No, then it will just ask you. So if you just do queue like this, then it will pop up this window asking you if you want to save the workspace image, yes, no, or cancel. I don't know if cancel is actually an option. No, so you can only say yes or no, but never say yes. Always say no. So that's just my tip because it will hurt you in the long run because some variable X might be floating around from when you did a previous analysis and you don't want that. You want the whole analysis to be nothing more than what you put in your script. All right, so this is just a little bit about managing your session. Of course, like I told you in R, help is always available. So if you do question mark and then the name of a function, then it opens up the help file for this function. If I do question mark, if I just, if I don't know the function that I'm searching for, I can do double question mark and then a search term. So for example, if I want to open up the help file for the sec function, I just do question mark sec. If I want to open up the help file for the plus function, like I told you, every function in R has a help file, even plus, even just addition. But because plus is a special symbol, you then have to do the air quotes surrounding it so that it knows that you want to look at the help file for the plus function. And the help file for the plus function is really done because it just says this does addition, which is good. But it has an example. So if you don't know how addition works, there is an example there. If you want to search for something, like if you want to search for a function which deals with things like obesity, then you can do question mark, question mark, obesity, it will pop up a browser. And in the browser, you will see a list of things where the word obesity is mentioned. So you can search for obesity, but you can also search for other things. So if you want to do things like chi-square, then you do question mark, question mark, chi, and then it will search for chi-squares or everything that hits chi. All right. So the type system. And now it starts becoming interesting because there are different types in R. And these types of data are very important because they change the way that R looks at data. So of course, the most basic type that you can come up with is the logical type. So the logical type is true being coded by one and false and coded by zero. Or that's not entirely true because false is zero and true is defined as everything besides zero. So the logical values true and false, false being zero, true being everything else but zero. If you transform a true to a numerical value, then the false value has a numerical value of zero and the true will have a numerical value of one. But if I transform five to a logical, then five will be true. Numeric values are just numeric values. So that means it's five, it's 7.9 or 100.6. R has no notion of floating point numbers versus integers. A lot of programming languages make this distinction that something can be an integer, meaning one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, until infinity. And a floating point number like 2.3 or 7.9, R doesn't make that distinction. R just has a numerical value and a numerical value is any number. We have character values and character values are poorly named because character values can be single characters but can also be multiple characters. So the string one is a character type. Two is also a character type. The vector type is then a list of things. So I can use the c function, the combine function to combine things together into a list of elements. And this list of elements gets the type, the highest type. So this is the lowest type, intermediate type, and this is the highest type. And that is because a numeric value can be converted to a character, but a character cannot be converted to a numeric. So it has a kind of layered type system. Vectors are, there's three different types of vectors. You have numeric vectors, character vectors, and logical vectors. So I can have like a vector containing 1, 2, 5.36 and minus 2.4, or minus 2 and 4. And I can put this in something called v1. So here I define a variable v1. I use the combine function to combine these numbers together in a vector. I can create a character vector the same way, and I can create a logical vector exactly the same way. There's also a matrix types, which is a kind of tabular form. And here I am creating a matrix, which has the numbers 1, 2, 20 in there. It has five rows and four columns, and then I store it in a variable called y. Is this clear? Well, it doesn't matter if it's clear. There will be a short quiz in a short while anyway. So if you want to work with types, then there are some helpful functions, something like the length of an object. So if you ask for length of the name of a variable, it will tell you how many elements there are in. So if we would type, if we would define these three vectors, like for example, vector number two, and I would say length of v2, then it will tell you three. There's three elements in v2, like one, two and three. If I would ask for the length of v3, it will be five, because there's five logical units in this vector. The str is useful when you have more complex objects, because you can have a list with a vector with a matrix in there. So the str just gives you the structure of an object. And the class of an object will tell you what class or what type an object is. So if I say class of v2, then it will say character. If I ask for the class of v3, it will say logical. The names of an object in R, you can name things. So you can create a vector which has names, and then you can get the names of the object as well. So let me give you a small example of that. So we saw this v2 write, which is one, two and three. And now when I type v2, you see that it has three elements in there. But I can give it names as well. So I can say a1 equals one, a3 equals two, and b1 equals three. And now when I type v2, it will give names to this object. So if I now want to select this element from the vector, I can use v2, give me the second element, or I can say from v2, give me the element named b1. And then it will take the b1 element. So you can name anything. And this is really useful because often when you have measurements, measurements are done on individuals. And because of that, the individuals have names. So you often or you almost always want to use names for things to make them descriptive and to make your script more useful. This is especially true for here. When I say from v2 select the second element, it is better to select it by the name a3. And why is that? Well, if I would take v2 and I would add something to v2, for example, the object a with having a name called Hari or something like that. Right? Now when I say v2 element 2, the second element is now not the second element that it was. But if I would select v2, b1, I would still get the same thing. So it's good to use names because names don't change when you add or remove things from a vector, while the index like 1, 2, 3, 4 can change when you add or when you remove things. So just a tip, if you can use names, use names. How to know which brackets to use? Yeah, that's a very, very difficult question. So there's a whole slide on brackets and brackets is the thing that just it's going to be difficult. Square brackets are for selecting things from a list. Round brackets are calling functions. And the c is a function. So I say c1, 2, 3 to combine these three things together because c is a built-in function. v2 is not a built-in function. It is a list. And if I want to select something from a list, I use the square brackets. And you also have like the curly brackets and we will get to those. But there's a slide about it. So I will just continue. You can force things to be a certain type or you can ask if something is of a certain type. So if I want to know if a certain thing is a numerical value, let's go back to r, I can say is numeric v2. And it will say no, v2 is not numeric. If I want to ask if it is a character, then it will say yes, v2 is a character. So hey, you can and I can also force things to be or to go from one type to another. Does r put additions in a vector always on the first place or does it sort the element? No, I actually put it in the first place, right? I said here combine, Harry equals a and then v2. If I want to add something at the end of v2, I can say v2 is combine v2 and then put something after v2, which is called lala equals seven, right? If I do this, now it will take v2 and then add to the back the number seven with the name lala. However, if I now look at v2, then you see that the seven actually was upgraded. I put in the numeric seven, but because the other elements are not numeric, it upgrades the seven to be of a character type. And this is the thing that goes wrong most of the time in r. So the r type system is complex. It tries to be very smart and sometimes it's too smart for its own good. But depending on how I combine things, I can add it to the back or I can add it to the front. All right, so I can ask if something is of a certain type and I can actually force it to be of a certain type as well. So let's do this on v2. I can say as numeric v2 and then it will say, well, I introduced nA's, right? Because some things cannot be converted to numerics. The only one which could be converted to a numeric is this last one. So the value seven can be converted to seven, but a, one, two, and three cannot be converted to a numerical value. So those turn into nA's. So missing values, because I'm forcing it to be. So to create a vector or a matrix, if I want to create a vector, I can use the c function like we saw before.  If I want to have a sequence, then I can also use the sec function, which creates a sequence from something to something by something. And I can repeat something an x number of times. So let's just give you a quick example of that. So I can, for example, say c123, right, which just creates a vector containing one, two, and three. I can do a sequence from one to a thousand, stepping by 50, right? So that's 151, 101, 151. And I can say, repeat the number a 20 times. And then it just repeats the number a 20 times. So that's how you can create vectors out of nothing. You can also create matrices. So the way to create matrices is using the matrix keyword. Then you say, you give it a vector. So these are the values that it is going to put into the matrix. And then you have to specify the number of rows and then the number of columns. You can also use the C bind function. So the C bind function is when you already have a matrix, and you want to add a column to the matrix. So I can say C bind an object to an object. So in this case, if I have a matrix, I can see bind to that matrix. So let's create a matrix, which has the numbers one to 20 in there. It has four rows, five columns, then it looks like this. And I can store this in variable, for example, a a. And now I can say C bind to a a a new column called Denny, and put in the values. And now I have to give four values, of course, because the column has four elements. So one, two, and three, and four. And now when you look at the matrix, it made a new column at the back called Denny, and it contains the values one, two, three, four. Of course, I could have bound it to the front as well, by doing like this. And now the Denny column that I just created will be on the front. There's also row bind function, which does the same thing. But now it works on rows. So you can add a row on the bottom or an add a row on the top. So that's the R bind function. All right, so there's slightly different ways to create a vector as well. There's this double point operator, which will, which is a shorthand for the sec function. And that is just go from one to four stepping by one. So it's it's sec one four. So it's sec one four comma one. But you can also write one, two, four. Here for the matrix, some examples on how to do that. Hey, you can see buying stuff together, or you can row bind vectors together to create a matrix as well. So when we type, or when when you type the name of a vector, right, you see that it puts these numbers in front. And when I type a matrix, you see that it automatically numbers the columns. So these are the indexes. So this is the first row. This is the first column like this. So the indexes are automatically assigned by our unless you give it names. So if I want to get stuff out of a vector, I always use the square brackets. If I want to, for example, select the fifth element from a vector, if I have a vector, which contains the letters a to I, and I want to select the fifth one, then I'm selecting the e. I can also from the vector, so I can, I can use a vector as an index to a vector. So in this case, I say from v, select the second to the fifth element, and then it will select for me a b c b c d and e. I can also from vector v select elements. So select, make a vector combine two to five. And then also give me the eighth number of the vector. So this will give me b c d and e. And it will also give me h. Is that clear? It's, it's just a way like you can use a numerical vector as the index to any vector to get the elements that you are interested in. But here you use the square brackets. Of course, here you use the round brackets for the C function. So here I create a vector. Why do we need to see here? Well, because we can, we need to specify that we also want element number eight. Two to five gives us this. And then if we want to have the eighth element as well, then we need to create a vector which contains two, three, four, five and eight. So that's why I'm using the C function here to combine the number eight with the vector two to five. And then I'm using this vector as the index to vector fee. It's a little bit swiveling. So you can swivel around and select. And of course, if I would put eight in front, so if I would say c eight, comma two to five, then it would give me the vector h a first age. No, that's not allowed. So v two to five, comma eight will give you an error. Because you're not doing anything with like two to five, comma eight is not meaningful. That's not a, so if I would just say v is letters and from letters, give me the first 10 or something. C for combine. Yeah, yeah. So hey, if I would take v, and I would take like the first letters, and then from V, I can select, for example, one to five. I can also select the other way around. I can select five to one, then it would select the other way around. I can select, for example, element one, four, seven and nine. And I also can selected the other way around. So I could also do something like this. So C combines and you can use any vector as an index to a vector. So you can use a numeric and a logical factor as so, but it will become more complex. Like, trust me, you can do a lot of weird things. But had just the basic understanding is that the square brackets here, you use to select from V. And the thing that we are selecting from V is, is can be specified using the index. And here we are using multi indexing. So we are saying combine two to five, and then eight. It's something that you just have to practice, right? It's something that will become very, very useful or very, very natural to you when you continue using R for, for some time. We can also do the same, we can index from a matrix as well. Same strategy applies. So from a matrix. And then now I within the square brackets, I have to give two coordinates, one coordinate for which rows I want, and then a coordinate for which column I want. So from matrix, if this is my matrix, when I say select the first to the third row from the first column, then I'm selecting these three numbers. So 0.7, 0.2 and 0.2. If I say from the fifth row, give me the third to the sixth column, then it will give me 0.42, 0.5, 3, 0.4. So it just selects. Isn't that the German flag? Kind of. The colors are more or less randomly chosen. And they, they, they change based on the system that I do. I can actually also select a single element like here. I can also select the whole column or a whole row by just leaving this empty. So if I say m square bracket open comma nine square bracket close, then it will know that, oh, I want to have the whole ninth column. Good. Is that clear? Then we will take a short break again. Let me think what did I actually come up with for animated GIFs. So let me.