01 — Getting Started

Course outlook, good research practice, and modern AI tools.

Lift off.

This module introduces the course, covers good research practice and reproducibility, and surveys modern AI tools for economists.

Lecture slides

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Setup

Please complete the following before the course.

1. GitHub

• Sign up for a free GitHub account.
• Fork the course repository.

2. Install core tools

macOS (recommended path)

Install Homebrew first (the macOS package manager):

/bin/bash -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/Homebrew/install/HEAD/install.sh)"

Then install R, Quarto, and Git:

brew install --cask r
brew install --cask quarto
brew install git

Windows

• R 4.4+ — download the Windows installer
• Quarto 1.6+ — download the Windows installer
• Git for Windows — includes Git Bash

All platforms

• Install Visual Studio Code (or Positron)
• In VS Code, install the R extension and the Quarto extension

3. R packages

Open R and run:

install.packages("pacman")
pacman::p_load(
  tidyverse,    # data wrangling & visualization
  data.table,   # fast data manipulation
  ggplot2,      # plotting
  rvest,        # web scraping (module 04)
  sf,           # spatial data (module 07)
  terra,        # raster data (module 07)
  quanteda,     # text analysis (module 06)
  torch,        # deep learning backend (module 10)
  ellmer         # LLM API access (module 10)
)

For module 10 (LLMs), you additionally need to install the torch backend:

torch::install_torch()

Further resources

• Karl Broman’s initial steps toward reproducible research
• Grant McDermott’s introduction to Git
• MIT’s The Missing Semester: Version Control
• GitHub’s Git Handbook
• Christoph Hanck et al.’s Introduction to Econometrics with R