Lecturers
David Schoch
Team lead for “Transparent Social Analytics” in the Department for Computational Social Science at GESIS in Cologne
Chung-hong Chan
Senior Researcher in the team “Transparent Social Analytics” in the Department for Computational Social Science at GESIS in Cologne
About the course
Creating professionally looking scientific reports and papers are recurring tasks for social scientists - and often time-consuming. This workshop introduces Quarto and the associated Markdown-based systems for generating automated reports using literate programming techniques to facilitate this process. Literate programming is the paradigm of combining code, its output, and its interpretation in a single document. For example, one can embed scripts for data analysis in R or Python in a Quarto file to generate tables and figures reproducibly. This allows to create fully reproducible, beautiful documents with little effort. In this course, we will cover the basics of writing automated reports with Quarto, as well as academic-specific topics such as bibliography generation and collaborative writing with non-technical individuals. Additionally, we will cover how Quarto can be used to create high-quality presentations and webpages, such as a personal page or for a project.
Schedule
day 1:
09:00 – 10:30: Introduction to literate programming and setting up Quarto
10:30 – 10:45: Coffee break
10:45 – 12:15: Writing your first Quarto document: Introduction to Markdown Syntax
12:15 – 13:45: Lunch break
13:45 – 15:15: Literate programming: Combining Markdown and R / Python
15:15 – 15:30: Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00: Exporting to different formats
day 2:
09:00 – 10:30: Let’s make a presentation with Quarto
10:30 – 10:45: Coffee break
10:45 – 12:15: Let’s make a website with Quarto
12:15 – 13:45: Lunch break
13:45 – 15:15: Let’s write an academic paper with Quarto
15:15 – 15:30: Coffee break
15:30 – 17:00: Q&A
Software
- A text editor, e.g. RStudio, VS Code
- R
- Quarto