Last week I attended the Toronto Workshop on Reproducibility where I had to the pleasure of giving one of the keynotes.

When I was asked to give a keynote for this event on teaching, I had the idea of reflecting on almost 9 years of teaching with introductory statistics and data science through the lens of reproducibility. I would have said “teaching with R Markdown”, but looking back through my notes, this wasn’t true as the rmarkdown package has not been around for that long – turns out I started teaching with it when it was just knitr. Frankly, some of the details are blurry, but as I explained in my talk, I remember sitting in the audience at useR! 2012 in Nashville where Yihui and JJ introduced knitr in their keynote, and literally updating my course labs while I was sitting there to use knitr!

This was also an opportunity to reflect on and discuss what changed (and what didn’t) since my first blog post on Citizen Statistician which was on this topic and our paper on teaching with R Markdown that is still very relevant today.

Video of the talk and slides are below.




You can find a full set of the videos from this fantastic event at rohanalexander.com/reproducibility.html. Thank you Rohan for organizing and inviting me!

I should also say a few words about the title of the talk and the cover slide. As I was brainstorming ideas with Colin, he told me about the essay by Neal Stephenson called In the Beginning… Was the Command Line. I had not read it at the time, but I have now! The title is a loose take on this, even though the content of the talk is not at all based on it. I also really liked the cover of the book and decided to style my talk title slides based on it.

Given that this is a talk on reproducibility, I didn’t have the heart to not generate this image reproducibly, so I forked Sharla Gelfand’s ggkeyboard package and altered it a bit to get what I need. You can find my version (that is only useful for generating this image) here.

# devtools::install_github("mine-cetinkaya-rundel/ggkeyboard")
library(ggkeyboard)

ggkeyboard(
  in_the_beginning_full, 
  palette = keyboard_palette("in_the_beginning"), 
  adjust_text_colour = FALSE
)

Keyboard that spells out 'In the beginning was R Markdown' in the keys.

Once I got the keyboard layout working I searched around for color inspiration on same.energy where I stumbled upon this gorgeous design and used the Digital Color Meter app on my Mac to create a palette for the cover image and the talk.

If you’d like to do something similar yourself, all it takes is to edit the CSV files in the data-raw folder for your desired output. You can then update the package data with usethis::use_data() and use the new keyboard style you created in one of the functions provided by the package. If you want to give this a try I recommend starting from Sharla’s package and using my fork in case you’re curious how I went about it.

Finally, in case you only read this and don’t get a chance to watch the video or look through the slides, the talk ends with

In the beginning was R Markdown and R Markdown continues to facilitate reproducibility, no matter your scope and experience.