Workshop Introduction

Author

Affiliations

Egor Kotov

Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research

Universitat Pompeu Fabra

This website provides supporting materials for the workshop Open Science and Reproducibility with Quarto, GitHub, and R which is part of the European Doctoral School of Demography (EDSD) 2024 preparatory courses hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (Rostock, Germany). This website, its source as well as all the supporting materials are licensed under the CC0 license.

Expected learning outcomes

• Able to use Quarto to create html documents with plain and markdown-formatted text and R code.

• Able to upload a project with reproducible analysis to GitHub.

Prerequisites

Students must have basic R training, including knowledge of the tidyverse for data manipulation and ggplot2 for data visualization, as well as familiarity with RStudio (as provided in the EDSD 140 Computer Programming for Demographers course). To participate in the workshop, we recommend that you have a GitHub account and have R, RStudio, and git installed. You can follow the setup instructions here.

Recommended readings

1. How to create a GitHub account: https://docs.github.com/en/get-started/start-your-journey/creating-an-account-on-github
2. Brief intro to Quarto: https://quarto.org/docs/get-started/hello/rstudio.html
3. Quarto documentation: https://quarto.org/docs/reference/

Quarto is “an open-source scientific and technical publishing system” ¹ that allows you to generate reproducible reports, websites, presentations and much more, by mixing plain text, simple markdown text formatting, and code. And not just R code, but also Python and Julia. The output format can be html, pdf, but also docx (if you really need it). You can also use addons/extensions to convert simple documents written in Quarto to publication ready pdfs using relevant templates.

Footnotes

1. Source: https://quarto.org/