01-automation-instructor-notes.md

01-automation Instructor notes

1. Show the starting point (see content of example-manuscript folder):

   • one file per country in the data-raw folder

2. Explain motivation of the manuscript:

• explore change in life expectancy by continent across two time periods

1. Ask participants to open manuscript-inline.Rmd and make sure they can all compile to HTML from within RStudio

2. Present analysis and results in a little more detail:

• in the manuscript, we look at minimum and maximum life expectancy summarized across continents, draw a plot of the change in life expectancy through time for each continent, compare the rate of change in life expectancy (linear model) between lowest year and a breaking point (1985 by default, can be changed by participants later); and breaking point in latest year. Notice that rate of change in life expectancy has been decreasing for all continent (particularly noticeable for Africa), except for Oceania where it has accelerated.

1. Go through details of the document manuscript-inline.Rmd to explain its structure and highlight:
   • there is many more lines of code than text and that most of the code is actually duplicated
   • show that changing the variable break_year changes all the numbers, and graphs in the manuscript
   • show that there are chunks that:
     • prepare the data (convert from raw to workable, create the intermediate datasets the graphs are based on)
     • make plots
     • fit linear models to the data and extract summary statistics from it

The code is pretty advanced for participants not too familiar with R. It's OK if they don't understand it all. They should however have a sense for what each chunk does and they fit together.