Part 1 – Credibility and tools
Part 1 asks what a claim in social science is for, why people describe the field as being in crisis, and what a computational toolchain has to do with either question. The hands-on work comes at the end and runs into the first break, so that if your machine gives trouble you miss none of the talk.
| Work through | What you do | Timing |
|---|---|---|
| Slides, Part 1 | Follow the talk: what social science is for, and why the worry is structural rather than a matter of fraud; the twenty-nine teams of the red-card study and the estimates they returned; why ‘replication’ names three different operations; the SCORE programme and its three studies; and Multi100 from the position of an analyst inside it, ending on a forest plot of the five analysts’ results. | 62 minutes |
| Slides, the tools segment | Take in the toolchain: open-source software, plain-text file formats and why they survive, the render pipeline, packages, version control, where data and code are archived, licences, and what the tools cannot do. Note anything you might switch to. | 18 minutes |
| Your workspace, or Browser lab Task 1 | Get to the point where a line of R runs and the panel of 270 country-years is in front of you. The three R’s warm-up on the browser lab page gives you something to do while the R engine downloads. | 8 minutes, and the 30-minute break after it if you need more |
By the end of the part you have R running with the panel of 270 country-years loaded, and you can distinguish the three operations that go under the single word ‘replication’.