Course Chairs: Gail Clement, Head of Research Services, Caltech Library
Instructor: Gail Clement, Head of Research Services, Caltech Library;
Tom Morrell, Research Data Specialist, Caltech Library
This interactive and hands-on program from Author Carpentry draws on open-source tools and open-science practices to create reproducible reports and dynamic documents using R Markdown. R Markdown is an open, powerful and easy-to-use authoring syntax for combining text, code, figures and other document features needed for publication, presentations and websites. Researchers across the disciplines are shifting to this approach, allowing them to “author once” and output to many, and also to create fully open and reproducible reports for human and machine reading and reuse.
Participants will gain proficiency authoring professional research communications (research reports, slides and web pages) that interweave explanatory narrative, code, data and citations for human and computer use. Participants will also survey models of dynamic, openly authored research publications and presentations produced using an open authoring pipeline, and discuss their advantages. Combining presenter demonstrations, hands-on sessions and expert guest lectures, the interactive sessions will take authors step-by-step through a workflow using readily available applications and proven recipes.
By week’s end, participants will:
- Identify the features of a reproducible and dynamic research communication that is fit to enter the scholarly record.
- Recognize at least three models of “Future Papers” now in publication.
- Describe the benefits of composing research reports with open authoring tools.
- Demonstrate a text-based workflow for creating a paper that combines dynamic text, code and software.
- Demonstrate an open-source workflow for automatically converting openly authored documents for publication, online posting and professional presentation.
- Demonstrate use of the RStudio GUI platform for authoring and producing professional-quality research reports.
