Workshop

Dynamic documents in R: Introduction to Quarto

When working with script-based languages such as R or Python, dynamic documents (or notebooks) are essential tools for establishing reproducible workflows. In this workshop, we will look at how to work with R using Quarto, an open-source scientific publishing system. Our main focus will be on the documentation of statistical analyses and data visualization, and we will discuss good practices for reproducible research. These include a variety of topics, such as the use of R projects with a sensible (sub)directory structure and a few tricks to avoid getting into trouble. You will learn how to set up an R project for an empirical study, document your analysis using Quarto markdown, export publication-quality graphs, and render your notebook from R code into a reader-friendly format (PDF, html, or .docx). Apart from this main focus on data analysis, we will provide a brief glimpse of what else can be done with Quarto, and why it has developed into an ecosystem for academic publishing. Additional features include the authoring and typesetting of books, the preparation of presentation slides, and the creation of a website and/or blog. To profit from this workshop, participants should be familiar with RStudio’s graphical user interface and they should have some fundamental knowledge of how to use R for working with data (see e.g. Winter 2020: Chapter 1; or Gries 2021: Chapter 2). No statistical background is required.

Winter, Bodo. 2020. Statistics for linguists: An introduction using R. Routledge.
Gries, Stefan Th. 2021. Statistics for linguistics with: A practical introduction. De Gruyter.