Chapter 7

Git and Github Pages

You’ve got so many files by now.

Raw data, exploratory scripts, Rmd and HTML files.

Git is useful for version control, especially when working with teams on big projects. And GitHub is useful because it’s built on top of Git and lets the public download your files for free.

Git started out as version control system and has since been “repurposed” beyond software development

Journalists use it for methodology, but also to share raw and summarized data.

For teams to collaborate

It’s kinda complicated

So why?

It might be tough to justify for someone working solo.

But it’s worth learning because of the capabilities for communicating your analysis and for future collaboration.

Show off! Collaborate!

  • The R Community is active on GitHub
  • The more often you use it, the more often you can use others’ code and data
  • Easily import from GitHub repos into your workflow
  • Simple to run Shiny Apps locally with runGithub function

Files and folders

The repo for this class is on GitHub, but can be easily downloaded to your desktop with the following commands:

install.packages("usethis")

usethis::use_course("https://github.com/r-journalism/learn-chapter-7/archive/master.zip")

In this section

Readings

  • Excuse me, do you have a moment to talk about version control? - Jennifer Bryan
  • fivethirtyeight data repo - Github
  • BuzzFeedNews/everything - Github
  • WPInvestigative - Github

© Copyright 2018, Andrew Ba Tran

© Copyright 2018, Andrew Tran