Week 1, Part 2: Reproducibility & Quarto
The theme of these readings is good management of your files and data. In part two of this week’s coursework you learned how to identify folders and paths, and create Quarto documents.
📖 Readings: 30 minutes
📽 Watch Video: 20-30 min
1 Reproducibility and Workflow
As boring as it sounds, file management is arguably one of the most important skills a data scientist should have. The success of a project depends just as much on the way in which the project was stored as the computing tools used. While using R and Quarto make an important step in creating a reproducible analysis, there are other pieces that are arguably just as important—such as file management.
There has been a bit of generational shift as computers have evolved: the “file system” metaphor itself is outdated because no one uses physical files anymore. This article is an interesting discussion of the problem: it makes the argument that with modern search capabilities, most people use their computers as a laundry hamper instead of as a nice, organized filing cabinet. I will say I have noticed this anecdotally - and while this may work for you a lot of the time, if you aren’t organized with coding you will run into some serious headaches!
Stop watching at 4:16.
📖 Required Reading: R4DS: Workflow and Scripts
If you are still feeling hazy on file systems and file paths, watch the optional videos 📽.
2 Quarto
📖 Required Reading: R4DS: Intro to Quarto
HTML Documents
We will exclusively use HTML documents in this course. If you are interested in learning more about formatting options for Quarto HTML documents, I would recommend checking out: