Week 2: Your Computer

Assignment: Data Notebooks in Quarto (Due Week 3)

Author

Prof. Jack Reilly

Published

F2025

Due This Week: Problem Set 2

Readings

Lecture: A Practical Guide to Your Computer

  • In the course drive, find the file Week 3 Files.zip. Unzip the file in the directory on your computer that you use for coursework.1 Inside the unzipped file, you will find a .qmd file, which has also been compiled into a pdf, html, docx, and rtf files. Read it, and pay special attention to how the .qmd file structure and commands relate to the output in the compiled documents.
  • Recommended reference reading:
    • DV, ch 2
    • The Markdown Guide, <https://www.markdownguide.org>
    • The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science, ch 3-4 (https://plain-text.co/index.html)
      • Note: The Plain Person’s Guide is a little out of date techinically - some of the tools discussed have newer, and better, versions - but the overlying principles and philosophy are what you should pay attention to

Data & Computational Work

There is no major new software to install. However, we will be rendering text to output document types, like pdf, docx, and html. Docx and html files will render without additional software, but .pdfs need extra bits added. If you would like to compile to PDF, run the following lines of code:

install.packages("tinytex")

tinytex::install_tinytex()

This places a small tex installation inside R for you.

Due Next Week: Problem Set 3

Footnotes

  1. Windows tries to help you by letting you click directly into .zip files without unzipping them. This lets you see into the file, which is helpful, but prevents you from editing things inside the file, which is not (and will make R throw you errors). So make sure to unzip the file before loading it and rendering.↩︎