5  Pre-workshop tasks

In order to participate in this workshop, you must complete the pre-workshop tasks in this section as well as completing the survey at the end. These tasks are designed to make it easier for everyone to start the workshop with everything ready to go. For some of the tasks, you might not understand why you need to do them, but you will likely understand why once the workshop begins.

Important

Depending on your skills and knowledge, these tasks could take between 5-7 hrs to finish, so we suggest planning a full day to complete them. Depending on your institution and how they handle installing software on work computers, you also might have to contact IT very early to make sure everything is properly installed and set up.

5.1 List of tasks

Here’s a quick overview of the tasks you need to do. Specific details about them are found as you work through this section.

  1. Do some pre-reading to get a better idea of the workshop content ().
  2. Read through the Code of Conduct (in ).
  3. Install the necessary programs and the right versions of those programs in . 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 ?sec-install-r-packages.
  5. Correctly set up Git on your computer in , if you haven’t done this already from previous workshops. If you haven’t used Git before, this task could take a while because of the reading.
  6. Run a check with r3::check_setup() to see if everything works. You’ll later need to paste this output into the survey.
  7. Connect your computer with GitHub in .
  8. Create an R Project in , along with the folder and file setup and creating a Quarto file.
  9. Write (well, mostly copy and paste) R code to download the data and save it to your computer. This task will probably take up maybe 30-60 minutes depending on your interest in exploring the data.
  10. Run a check using r3::check_project_setup_advanced() to see that everything is as expected. You’ll later need to paste this output into the survey.
  11. Complete the pre-workshop survey (in ). This survey is pretty quick, maybe ~10 minutes.

Check each section for exact details on completing these tasks.

5.2 Learning objective

In general, these pre-workshop tasks are meant to help prepare you for the workshop and make sure everything is setup properly so the first session runs smoothly. However, some of these tasks are meant for learning as well as for general setup, so we have defined the following learning objectives for this page:

  1. Learn about and then apply some basic reproducible workflows and setups for the initial processing of raw data. For those who have already participated in the intermediate R workshop, the objective is to review what you previously learned.

5.3 Reading the workshop 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.
Tip

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