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5  Overview

In order to participate in this workshop, you must complete everything in this section and finish with completing the survey (Chapter 15) at the end. These tasks are meant to provide everyone with the necessary setup and a shared foundation for the workshop.

Depending on your prior knowledge and skills, these tasks could take between 5-7 hrs to finish, so we suggest planning some time to complete them. While many of the tasks are mostly readings, they are important in making sure you get the most out of the workshop.

5.1 How to read this 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.

For R-specific conventions:

  • 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.

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 Summary 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 in Chapter 6.
  2. Read through the Code of Conduct in Chapter 7.
  3. Install the necessary programs and the right versions of those programs in Chapter 8. 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. Complete Chapter 9 to setup and authenticate your computer with GitHub.
  5. Install the necessary R packages in Chapter 10.
  6. Correctly set up Git on your computer in Chapter 11, 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.
  7. Run a check with r3::check_setup() to see if everything works. You’ll later need to paste this output into the survey.
  8. Create an R Project in Chapter 12, along with the folder and file setup and creating a Quarto file.
  9. Connect your R Project to GitHub to create a GitHub repository in Chapter 13.
  10. Write (well, mostly copy and paste) R code to download the data and save it to your computer in Chapter 14. This task may take 10-15 minutes, depending on your interest in exploring the data.
  11. 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.
  12. Complete the pre-workshop survey (in Chapter 15). This survey is pretty quick, maybe ~10 minutes.
Tip

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