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
PDFs of all these readings are available on Canvas.
- 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”
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus “They Studied Dishonesty. Was Their Work a Lie?” The New Yorker (October 9, 2023), https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/10/09/they-studied-dishonesty-was-their-work-a-lie.
- Gideon Lewis-Kraus “How a Scientific Dispute Spiralled into a Defamation Lawsuit,” The New Yorker (September 12, 2024), https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/how-a-scientific-dispute-spiralled-into-a-defamation-lawsuit.
- Graham W. Lee, William C. Mao, and Veronica H. Paulus “Harvard Revokes Tenure from Francesca Gino, Business School Professor Accused of Data Fraud,” The Harvard Crimson (May 27, 2025), https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/5/27/gino-tenure-revoked/.
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, as it were, the zeroth assignment and is due on the first day of class. Assignment 01 is the first regular assignment and is due Friday, August 29th.