Git or Github

Amanda Glazer

Instructor
Statistics

Amanda is a PhD candidate in the statistics department at Berkeley. Her research focuses on causal inference with applications in education, political science and sports. Previously she earned her Bachelor’s degree in mathematics and statistics, with a secondary in computer science, from Harvard.

Why Teaching Social Scientists How To Code Like A Professional Is Important

September 23, 2020
Jae Yeon Kim, Ph.D.

I use data science to study political learning, organization, and mobilization among marginalized populations. I have always loved programming and want to serve people lacking voice and representation in a society. I am blessed to have found and chosen computational social science—a field situated between social science and data science—as my main research area.

I also love teaching people how to code, especially social scientists, and I take that mission seriously. I have taught computational tools and techniques at both graduate and undergraduate levels in semester-...

Brooks Jessup, Ph.D.

Data Science Fellow
History

Brooks received his Ph.D. in History from UC Berkeley and was trained in Data Science at General Assembly. His work applies digital tools and methods to the study of modern cities and urban issues. At D-Lab, he teaches and consults on data analytics, machine learning, geospatial analysis, and natural language processing with Python and SQL.

Organized Code Repositories Accelerate Science and Facilitate Reproducubility

March 2, 2021
Pratik Sachdeva, Ph.D.

Computational and data-driven research increasingly requires developing complex codebases. At the same time, many scientists don’t receive training in software engineering practices, resulting in, for some, the perception that scientists write terrible software. As scientists, good software should accelerate our work and facilitate its reproducibility. While building good coding practices takes some time and experience, it doesn’t require a...

Manuscript Workflow with R Markdown and GIT

March 16, 2021
Lawrence Y. Tello

As part of my Masters of Public Health program I needed to complete a capstone. Working on a manuscript is a lot of back and forth: You need to make edits, fix your words and figures, and sometimes re-work entire sections. If you are like me, the thought of doing this process over a long period of time in Word makes me nauseous. Two main issues that cause this nausea for me are:

I frequently forget to make a record of my writing and often overwrite work

Copying and pasting figures while arguing with Word’s formatting...