Basic Markdown Homework

Objectives

By the end of this exercise, you should be able to:

  • Create a Quarto document and presentation in RStudio.
  • Demonstrate sufficient mastery to create documents suitable for publication.
  • Add multimedia content to the document.
  • Publish the content online.

Rationale

A fundamental tenet in modern research is keeping the data, analyses, and output as close as possible. One way to do this in R is to directly integrate the analyses and visualizations into creating the documents you produce. This may be research reports, presentations, posters, etc. The tighter the link between the document and the underlying data and analyses, the more efficient your actions are. This is why we are starting with Markdown.

Markdown is a method that allows you to focus on the content of your writing rather than the outward display and formatting. It is entirely in text, enabling easy versioning in a system like Git & GitHub with robust support across many platforms. The RStudio has a strong support set to allow you to develop a wide array of document types suitable for your work as a scientist. Moreover, it will enable you to embed analysis code (R, Python, Julia, etc.) directly into the body of your document/presentation/report/webpage.

This first step in using Markdown will focus on creating a basic document and presentation. Subsequent learning modules will introduce additional output types and increase the sophistication of the output. This exercise is intended to have you focus on the basics.

Context

Here are the instructions for this homework exercise. It will be an Assignment on Canvas with an accompanying Rubric for you to see how your content is evaluated. In addition, you may need the following resources on basic markdown formats and the Quarto document system that RStudio uses:
- Markdown Grammar.
- RStudio & Markdown.
- Quarto.

Activities

The following items will be used to evaluate your output.

  1. Create a folder in your ENVS543 RStudio project (you are opening RStudio in a project, right?), entitled Markdown.

  2. Create a Markdown Resume (or Curriculum Vitae) for yourself in this folder. There are a ton of resources available to you for this task. I would start with a general overview of the features necessary for producing a STEM resume. Here is a page and accompanying video from Indeed. Try to incorporate appropriate formatting as if you were going to link this to your LinkedIn profile.

  3. Render this as either HTML or DOCX and upload it for submission.