Hello! Welcome to POL 345 / SOC 305 / WWS 201. In order to participate in the course, you will need to install three pieces of software onto your computer.
The first piece of software we will install is R, which we will use for our statistical work.
Download and install R for Mac
Open your Terminal Application (you’ll find it in the Applications > Utilities folder) and type
xcode-select --install
Download and install R for Windows
Download and install Rtools for Windows
If, in the steps above, you allowed R and RStudio to put an icon on your desktop then you now have two. Put R’s icon in the trash and keep the RStudio one. Things will be less confusing that way.
The second piece of software we will install is RStudio, which will be provide a nice interface with R.
Go to Rstudio's download page and find the section RStudio Desktop
. We have already done step 1, so proceed to step 2 and download Rstudio for your operating system.
If, in the steps above, you allowed R and RStudio to put an icon on your desktop then you now have two. Put R’s icon in the trash and keep the RStudio one. Things will be less confusing that way.
Lastly, we will install LaTeX, which will allow you to compile your assignments to a PDF for submission.
For both Mac and Windows users,
OpenRStudio
Paste the following command into the Console. (It’s at the bottom left of the application window)
install.packages('tinytex')
tinytex::install_tinytex() # takes a while
NOTE for Mac users: You may get this error after running the second command above:
The directory /usr/local/bin is not writable. I recommend that you make it writable.
After the installation process finishes, another error most likely will appear stating
add_link_dir_dir: destination /usr/local/bin not writable.
Run the following commands in Terminal to resolve this:
sudo chown -R `whoami`:admin /usr/local/bin
~/Library/TinyTeX/bin/*/tlmgr path add
where whoami
is the name you use to log in to your Mac.
You’re all set!
Alternatively, you can simply generate Word documents rather than pdf documents for the work handed in during the course. If you choose to do this, you should remember to ‘print to pdf’ these documents before uploading to Blackboard.
To check Word document creation works, go to the RMarkdown document you created above and instead of clicking on the Knit button, press the menu indicator just to the right of it and choose ‘Knit to Word’.
pol345.student
allows students to unpack and complete questions
in the pre-precept handouts for Princeton University's course
Politics 345. This updated package is designed for the Fall 2021
Semster and was originally developed by Will Lowe and Marc Ratkovic
in Fall 2019.
The problem sets are a bit too big for CRAN, so you'll want to
make sure you've got the devtools
package installed. To do so, you can run
install.packages('devtools')
Then grab the package from GitHub like this:
devtools::install_github("ratkovic/pol345.student")
In order to access the course materials, you will need to load the library. This can be done with the command
library(pol345.student)
This will allow you to call all the functions in the package. This needs to be run only once per session.
The package can be updated while installed by calling
update_package()
For good measure, now restart your R session. In RStudio use the menu:
Session > Restart R
.
To start work on handout one, type
pol345.student::get_handout(1)
This will unpack the handout materials into a folder called
handout1
in your current working directory.
(Type getwd()
if you're not sure where that is.
You can change it using setwd
or through RStudio's
Session menu).
If you want to fresh start on the same handout, you'll can unpack
again under a different name (the get_handout
function won't
overwrite an existing folder.) To do this add a
newname
argument when y ou call the function. So, if you want
your new copy to be called "handout1-for-real", then use
pol345.student::get_handout(1, newname = "handout1-for-real")
Provided there's not already a folder of that name in your current working directory, you'll get a fresh set of handout materials unpacked there.
If you want to preview the questions in a handout materials without unpacking it into your local file system, use
pol345.student::preview_handout(1)
Working on precept is just the same; just use
get_precept(1)
,
get_precept(1, newname = "precept1-second-go")
, or
preview_precept(1)
as above.
You can view precept 1's 'answers' with
pol345.student::get_precept_answers(1)
Note: this shows one way to answer the questions. Often there will be others, so do not automatically assume that your code is incorrect if it does not match the code in the answers.
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