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trackdown

Collaborative writing through literate programming in R


@TASK4-2021 - 19/05/2021

Filippo Gambarota1

Claudio Zandonella Callegher1

Janosch Linkersdörfer2

Mathew Ling3

Emily Kothe3

[1] University of Padova

[2] University of California

[3] Deakin University

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A normal academic day...

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Writing

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Writing

  • Writing bibliography


  • Copy and paste statistics and results 😱


  • Tables and figures 😱


  • Collaboration
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What about collaboration and file versions?

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Is there a solution? 😱

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YES!
Literate programming 😍

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Code

# Plotting
plot(data)
# Computing mean
mean(data$response)
# Statistics
t.test(response ~ condition)
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Code

# Plotting
plot(data)
# Computing mean
mean(data$response)
# Statistics
t.test(response ~ condition)

Text

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Code

# Plotting
plot(data)
# Computing mean
mean(data$response)
# Statistics
t.test(response ~ condition)

Text

These components are usually separated...

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Literate programming...

Is a combination of text and code in order to produce high-quality, reproducible and scalable documents.

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An example...

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An example...

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This is great! But what about collaboration?

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Literate programming as asynchronus process...

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Literate programming as asynchronus process...

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Collaboration on plain text files

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The gold standard way to collaborate on plain text files is using a version control system:

  • Avoid multiple file version tracking a history


  • Professional way to manage projects with multiple people


  • Not intuitive and very different from a standard workflow
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GIT is powerful but tracking narrative is hard

Word-like approach

GIT Diff

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In an ideal world...

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In an ideal world...

  • Work using a literate programming framework
  • Collaborate on plain text files similarly as we usually do with Word or Google Docs



This is the aim of the trackdown package

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The big picture...

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The big picture...

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The trackdown package

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The trackdown package

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A suggested workflow

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A suggested workflow

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How a trackdown file looks like?

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How a trackdown file looks like?

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How a trackdown file looks like?

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How a trackdown file looks like?

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Also the final output

  • With the upload_file() function is possible to also upload the output document as .pdf or .html

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Other advantages of the plain-text + Google Docs approach

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Other advantages of the plain-text + Google Docs approach

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Other advantages of the plain-text + Google Docs approach

  • Collaboration with colleagues with a heterogeneous background while keeping all advantages of a knitr based document
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Other advantages of the plain-text + Google Docs approach

  • Collaboration with colleagues with a heterogeneous background while keeping all advantages of a knitr based document


  • Spell checking using standard tools available online (not completely possible in RStudio)


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Other advantages of the plain-text + Google Docs approach

  • Collaboration with colleagues with a heterogeneous background while keeping all advantages of a knitr based document


  • Spell checking using standard tools available online (not completely possible in RStudio)


  • All amazing collaboration tools available in Google Docs (comments, assignments, history, auto-saving, etc.)
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Check our repo on Github...

ClaudioZandonella/trackdown

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The developers 😎

<a href='mailto:filippo.gambarota@phd.unipd.it'>Filippo Gambarota</a>

Filippo Gambarota

<a href='mailto:claudiozandonella@gmail.it'>Claudio Zandonella <br/> Callegher</a>

Claudio Zandonella
Callegher

<a href='mailto:jlinkersdoerfer@ucsd.edu'>Janosch Linkersdörfer</a>

Janosch Linkersdörfer

<a href='mailto:m.ling@deakin.edu.au'>Mathew Ling</a>

Mathew Ling

<a href='mailto:emily.kothe@deakin.edu.au'>Emily Kothe</a>

Emily Kothe

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A special thanks to Psicostat members...

Check our website 😄

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filippo.gambarota@phd.unipd.it



Slides made with the Xaringan package by Yihui Xie

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A normal academic day...

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