Week 2: Overview

---

Week 2 -  Audience and Workflow

This week we will be continuing on with our discussion of some data communication principles by thinking carefully about the audience for our work. How can we get into the heads of others? That's what we'll need to do to leave some helpful information behind. 

We'll also be getting started with R by talking about workflow in R and the use of RMarkdown documents.

IMPORTANT NOTE ABOUT RMARKDOWN: Literally the same week that all the materials for this course were being finalized, RStudio released Quarto Links to an external site., which is largely an improvement over RMarkdown. It has easier integration of slides and non-R languages, and it has a WYSIWYG editor (i.e. as you're writing you see what the result will actually look like, instead of seeing the markdown code and having to knit it to see how it looks, and you can use dropdown menus to get at things like bulleted lists instead of having to remember all the Markdown code). And if you select the default "knitr" engine instead of "Jupyter", there are almost no differences in terms of how you use it (code chunk options are set differently, and some of the YAML settings are different, like using "html" instead of "html_document"). Because things are so similar, and because I just finished this darn course, I'm not going to redo the videos and materials to use Quarto instead of RMarkdown. However, you are more than welcome to do your work using Quarto. The video material carries over nearly 100% anyway. Just do File -> New File -> Quarto Document instead of RMarkdown Document. Then review the Quarto Links to an external site. website for any differences in how you have to use it (there aren't a lot).

---