Collaboration while using R Markdown
Advice based on a presentation by Michael Frank
In a highly recommendable presentation available on Youtube, Michael Frank walks us through R Markdown. Below, I loosely summarise and partly elaborate on Frank's advice regarding collaboration among colleagues, some of whom may not be used to R Markdown (see relevant time point in Frank's presentation).
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The first way is using GitHub, which has a great version control system, and even allows the rendering of Markdown text, if the file is given the extension ‘.md’ on GitHub. Furthermore, GitHub has made private repositories with any number of collaborators free.
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The second way is copying the text part of the unrendered R Markdown doc (i.e., excluding any long code chunks) to Word or Google Docs, or any other trackable editor. The collaborators would then edit the text, and refrain from editing any of the R or Markdown code (i.e., any inline code, hashes, etc.). Changes would be tracked and accepted (any unwanted edits of the code may be undone), and transferred to the original document.
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The third way is knitting the document to Word, which allows tracking changes, or otherwise knitting to PDF.
Pablo Bernabeu
Postdoctoral fellow at UiT –
The Arctic University of Norway
After doing a research master's, I became a PhD student and graduate teaching assistant in Psychology at Lancaster University, where I investigated how conceptual processing—that is, the comprehension of the meaning of words—is supported by linguistic and sensorimotor brain systems, and how research on this topic is influenced by methodological aspects such as the operationalisation of variables and the sample size of experiments. Currently, I am a postdoctoral fellow at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, where I am investigating the behavioural and neural underpinnings of multilingualism. Throughout my research, I have used methods such as behavioural and electroencephalographic experiments, corpus analysis, statistics and programming. Research materials at https://osf.io/25u3x. CV available here.