Introduction

In this 20 minutes session we introduce the concepts of workflow, openness and reproducability. In the first part, We argue why they are important and what as social scientists we can learn from data scientists. Our main argument is that, even though in the social sciences complete reproducability is often infeasible, we should strive for research to become as reproducable as possible.

In the second part we lay out the road-map for the rest of the workshop. Most importantly, we explain why in this workshop we make use a set of particular tools, namely:

  1. the Markdown language;
  2. Git;
  3. andGitHub

Note that We are aware that using a particular data analysis tool is costly in terms of time investment and is ideosyncratic in terms of preferences and needs. Therefore, we strongly support the underlying concepts and not so much specific tools or applications. However, in this workshop we decided to make use of the RStudio application for two main reasons: (i) it works the best out of the box for our purposes and (ii) at the moment most researchers probably work with this combination for reproducability (at least it gets the biggest buzz…)

Outcomes

After this session you should:

Slides

References

Reproducability: