Week 3: File Management

Assignment: Version Tracking in GitHub (Due Week 4)

Due This Week: Problem Set 3

Readings & Reference Material

Lecture: File Management and Version Control

• “Happy Git with R” https://happygitwithr.com/
• The Plain Person’s Guide to Plain Text Social Science, ch 2 (https://plain-text.co/index.html)
• Bryan, Jennifer. “Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about version control?”
• Wickham, Hadley. “Tidy Data”.
• Kuriwaki, Shuri. “Git for Students in the Social Sciences: A Pitch

Computer Work

If you do not have one already, create a GitHub account and obtain a GitHub Personal Access Token.

1. Register a GitHub Account.
2. (Optional) Install Git. Note: this step is only optional if you use the GitHub Desktop Client; if you use any other client, you must install Git at the command line.
3. Install a Git Client. I strongly recommend you use the GitHub Desktop Client, which comes with git built-in, so that you do not have to install git separately (and can thus skip step 2).
4. Get a Personal Access Token and connect your GitHub Desktop Client to GitHub.
5. (Optional) Start an initial repo.¹ We will do this together in workshop this week, as well, but you can get a head start if you like.

Due Next Week: Problem Set 4

Footnotes

1. Jargon alert: repo is short for “repository”.