Creating professionally looking scientific reports and papers are recurring tasks for social scientists - and often time-consuming. This workshop introduces Quarto and the associated Markdown-based systems for generating automated reports using literate programming techniques to facilitate this process. Literate programming is the paradigm of combining code, its output, and its interpretation in a single document. For example, one can embed scripts for data analysis in R or Python in a Quarto file to generate tables and figures reproducibly. This allows to create fully reproducible, beautiful documents with little effort.

In this course, we will cover the basics of writing automated reports with Quarto, as well as academic-specific topics such as bibliography generation and collaborative writing with non-technical individuals. Additionally, we will cover how Quarto can be used to create high-quality presentations and webpages, such as a personal page or for a project.

 

Organizational structure of the course

The workshop consists of eight 90-minute modules. The modules deal with a specific aspect of Quarto each starting with a short introduction by the lecturers. The main part of the modules will be hands-on where participants create their own documents, presentations, or webpages guided by the lecturers.

Participants will find the course useful if:

Basic knowledge of R or Python (good to have for following the programming examples, but not essential as this workshop is not centered around programming R or Python code)

A GitHub account to deploy a webpage (optional).

 

Software requirements