print("Hello, PAM 2070 Students!")

## [1] "Hello, PAM 2070 Students!"

Welcome to PAM 2070: Big Data for Big Policy Problems!

This repository is intended as a guide to the lab materials for PAM 2070. To be able to access the lab materials, you must become a member of our GitHub Organization. This requires you to:

• First, create a GitHub account if you do not already have one (whether through your Cornell NetID or just with a personal email)
• Next, send your GitHub username to Chris Hess email link.
• Finally, accept the GitHub organization invite sent to the email associated with your GitHub account.

As we progress through the course, we will make additional lab repositories available to students on this GitHub organization page. Lab 1 will be available to you as soon as you are a part of the big-data-big-problems organization. These repositories contain the data, a notebook of important programming and statistics concepts (which build week by week) and a problem set. Corresponding videos for the notebooks will be published on Canvas and give additional information and guidance.

How we will use Git/GitHub

Git is a system for version control, that is, managing a set of important scripts or documents over time. This allows us to build repositories of code, data and outputs that we can share on GitHub after we make changes on our local machines and commit the changes to a master version that we (the teaching team) can work together on. Git and GitHub are fantastic tools for collaboration!

You will use GitHub to download the lab repositories as they become available—students are encouraged to install and use Git on their local machine to interact with these remote GitHub lab repositories, but this is not mandatory. You can always download any repository as a compressed (.zip) folder. If you wish to learn Git for version control, start by installing Git on your local machine. Then, consider reading through the free book HappyGitwithR by Jenny Bryan of RStudio.

It helps to be hands-on with learning Git:

• make a test repository on your GitHub,
• clone it to your computer
• add a text file or sample R script (e.g., print("hello world"))
• open git (either command line or the graphical user interface) and navigate to your repository
• git add the new file to start tracking it
• git commit the changes you have made to the repository
• git push the commit from your local version of the repository to the master version located remotely on GitHub.

Git and GitHub are a great tools for social science—you can keep your work organized, share it with collaborators and create public facing websites for free with GitHub pages. A good project for developing your Git skills is to fork a repository like Beautiful Jekyll and create a personal website (hosted on GitHub) using the Jekyll framework.