5  Overview

In order to participate in this workshop, you must complete everything in this section and finish with completing the survey (Chapter 13) at the end. These tasks are meant to provide everyone with the necessary setup and a shared foundation for the workshop so that we have a smooth(er) start to the workshop. For some of the tasks, you may not understand why you need to do them, but we hope by the start of the workshop (and by the end) that you understand them better.

The pre-workshop tasks are designed not just to ensure everyone has everything set up for the workshop, but also as a learning activity on its own. These tasks are designed to help enable you to:

  1. Recall (or describe) what reproducible documents are and what Quarto is.
  2. Recall (or describe) the basics of Git and how to configure it on your computer.
  3. Describe in more detail what a filesystem is, what relative and absolute paths are, and how to make use of them with the fs and here R packages to navigate files in your project.
  4. Use functions to download and begin to organise raw data for your project.

These tasks could take between 2-6 hrs to finish depending on:

So, we suggest you plan at least a full day to complete these pre-workshop tasks and that you start them sooner than later.

5.1 How to read this website

We try to be consistent with the way to present certain information in this website. Specifically, we follow some conventions that you should be aware of:

  • Folder names always end with /, for example data/ means the data folder.
  • File names always end with their file extension, for example content.md means the file is a Markdown file.
  • R variables are always shown as is. For instance, for the code x <- 10, x is a variable because it was assigned with 10.
  • Functions always end with (), for instance mean() or read_csv().
  • Sometimes functions have their package name appended with :: so that you run the code from the specific package, since we likely haven’t loaded the package with library(). For instance, to install packages from GitHub using the pak package we use pak::pak("user/package_name"). You’ll learn about this more later.

5.2 Summary of tasks

If you haven’t already, go through the workshop overview section, including the Syllabus in Chapter 1, the Is this for you? found in Chapter 2, and Learning design in Chapter 4 to get an overview of what this workshop contains and the learning design behind the workshop material.

After that, please go through the the pre-workshop tasks designed to establish a shared foundation for the start of the workshop. This includes to:

  1. If you haven’t, read the syllabus and the Is this for you? sections to get an overview of the workshop and to see if it’s a good fit for you. It might also help to re-read it again if you already read it before.
  2. Read the Code of Conduct (in Chapter 6). We aim to be explicit rather than implicit, which is why we have this Code of Conduct. This way, we can explicitly state how we’d like the environment of the workshop to be, which is important not just because feeling safe and supported is important for mental well-being, but also because it is vital for effective learning.
  3. Follow the installation instructions in Chapter 7. Install a version of R, RStudio, and Git that is as updated as possible. For some people, depending on their institution, this task can take the longest amount of time because you have to contact your IT to install these packages.
  4. Install the necessary R packages in Chapter 8.
  5. Read about Git (in Chapter 9) and configure Git on your computer if you haven’t already. If you haven’t used Git before, this task could take a while because of the reading.
  6. Confirm your Git setup within the Git Basics (in Chapter 9) section with r3::check_setup(). This is a check to see if everything is working correctly. You’ll later need to paste this output into the survey.
  7. Create an R Project (in Chapter 10), including the folder, files, and Quarto file.
  8. Read about and set up GitHub (in Chapter 11) with RStudio. You’ll also connect the project you made in the previous step to GitHub.
  9. Download the data (in Chapter 12) and save it to your computer. Run the check r3::check_project_setup_intermediate() in this section to see that everything is as expected. You’ll later need to paste this output into the survey.
  10. Complete the pre-workshop survey (in Chapter 13): This survey is pretty quick, maybe ~10 minutes. There will be some bits from the tasks that you will need to paste into this survey.

Check each section for exact details on completing these tasks.

Tip

You will be taken through the pre-workshop tasks in order by clicking the arrow at the bottom of each page ➡️