egap / theory_and_practice_of_field_experiments

'Caramba y zamba la cosa, que vivan los experimentos!' -from 'Me Gustan Los Estudiantes' by Violeta Parra

EGAP Learning Days Book Repository

Caramba y zamba la cosa
que vivan los experimentos! 
-from 'Me Gustan Los Estudiantes' by Violeta Parra

This is the repository for the online EGAP Learning Days book which includes a materials to help researchers learn how to design and analyze data from randomized field experiments.

Contributing

We would love for anyone to improve this work. Please feel free to post ideas in the Github Issues. Also feel free to Fork and modify and make a pull request. If you have a message to send, the best way is to use the Issues. You can also send an email to [email protected].

If you want to work on the slides, you should go to the Learning Days Resources repository.

Tools

Here we describe how we develop this book and provide some guidance for people who want to collaborate with us in writing etc.

Markdown

We write the text for the modules in Markdown format. The slides are in R+Markdown format.

If you want help making tables, you can try the following online tool https://thisdavej.com/copy-table-in-excel-and-paste-as-a-markdown-table/.

R packages

We are also using the renv package to keep our libraries portable. So, before you start collaborating you will need to do the following:

install.packages("renv")

After you clone this repository you will want to do the following from within the Book working directory (for example opening the learningday-book.Rproj file in RStudio) to install all of the packages we use in this book do:

renv::restore()

Then you will need to restart R so that it begins work in the new R environment that we have created.

That command will read the renv.lock file

From then on, if you start R from within the book directory, you should be only using R packages installed locally and they need not clutter your whole system just to work on this book project. For example you should see something like this at the top of your R session console.

* Project '~/Documents/PROJECTS/theory_and_practice_of_field_experiments/Book' loaded. [renv 0.11.0]

We use the bookdown package. So you will need to install.packages("bookdown") before loading the theory_and_practice_of_field_experiments.Rproj file in RStudio.

To Deploy the Book Online

The book will automatically be built and deployed online for each push to the repository using github actions.

To build by hand

Before using github actions we used the _build.sh bash shell script for building locally OR we used the "Build Book" function in RStudio. Either way allows you to look at _book/index.html or the pdf or epub versions of the book on your own computer.

License

We are happy for others to use this work as long as EGAP is attributed. See the following license for the precise terms.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

theory_and_practice_of_field_experiments's Issues

How to support folks wanting to learn about experiments to manage policy evaluation.

One idea is a list of key attributes that a contract for evaluation should have. Labelling this as an enhancement for possible future versions.

Improve the HTML Slides

The HTML slides need some love and attention from someone who knows more than we do about CSS and HTML.

Fix video links

The book has now successfully recompiled. Yay Jake.

The links to the videos are broken (in Randomization). Maybe a task for @malisi ? I don't know how EGAP wants to do this kind of linking.

Fix the links to the egap methods guides

The links to the methods guides in the randomization module do not work. We should fix them.

Add links to latest EGAP LD slides

We have new slides and links should be added to all versions of the book.