Fall Reproducibility Workshop 2023 wraps up!
We have concluded teaching the fourth iteration of our Reproducibility Workshop! In just over a month, we have covered version control, intermediate and advanced R programming, collaboration via git and GitHub, and archiving and sharing research products through research compendia and literate programming. We will hold one final "show and tell" session where participants can demonstrate the ways they've applied some of these skills in their own work (stay tuned for takeaways from this session!)
In this iteration of the workshop, we've had two new instructors, Eric Scott and Renata Diaz, picking up from where Jessica Guo and Kristina Riemer left off. Jessica and Kristina developed the workshop materials over three successful runs of the workshop, leaving us with a strong foundation to work from. For this run of the workshop, we were able to create a website to host the slides and instructor notes for each session of the workshop. We hope this can be a resource for participants and instructors as the workshop continues to evolve!
Our group is always excited about learning new tools and helping researchers at UA adopt and apply new technologies. In this version of the workshop, we've transitioned to teaching methods for interacting with GitHub using the `usethis` package and the RStudio git pane, and using `tidyverse` workflows for data wrangling and iterating functions. We've also been very excited about using Quarto for literate programming (in fact, we used Quarto to make both our slides and the course website!) and we took the opportunity to teach participants to use Quarto in their work. Finally, by popular demand, we dedicated our final teaching session to sharing complicated scientific workflows, including a quick demo of the `targets` R package and Quarto documents containing code in multiple programming languages.
One of the exciting features of the ongoing workshop series is the opportunity to build a community of practitioners who can ask questions, troubleshoot, and support each other in learning new tools. We had a wonderful group of participants come together in this workshop, who were very generous in sharing their questions and problem-solving skills with each other. We'll continue to have these conversations in the group Slack channel and in other data-oriented community spaces. (And, of course, CCT-DS staff are always available to chat at our drop-in hours!)
As we think towards offering future iterations of the workshop, we’ll be thinking of new ways to get learners sharing how they’re implementing what they learn and we’ll consider introducing Quarto earlier on, since it was such a hit. The Fall Reproducibility Workshop will return again in 2024, so sign up for our mailing list if you’re interested in getting notified when the applications are open!