01. Doing Your Work Properly

This week …

Why is technical computing, in the broadest sense, organized in the way that it is? The specifics are, inevitably, the path-dependent product of particular historical developments. But we can also motivate the topic more positively in terms of ideas about organization and control through composable actions on files. We need to repeatedly do things with the computer; we want to be able to say and have some record of what we did; and we want to be able to open up and inspect the actions we took in order to change them if needed.

Reading

• Garrett Christensen, Jeremy Freese, and Edward Miguel Transparent and Reproducible Social Science Research (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). “Introduction” and Chapter 11, “Reproducible Workflow”.
• Kieran Healy “The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain-Text Social Science,” 2020, https://plain-text.co. “1. Introduction”

Other work

• Familiarize yourself with the content, examples, and assignments pages for this class.

Assignments

• This week (and only this week) there are two assignments. Assignment 00 is due on the first day of class. Assignment 01(/assignment/01-assignment-quarto-notes.qmd) is due the Friday after the first day.

Slides

(Will appear here after the seminar.)