Part 1 Introduction

Masterclass for the 2024 Annual Meeting of the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS2024), Australian National University, 26-29 November 2024

This ALS2024 masterclass introduces measures that help to improve transparency and produce reproducible results in linguistics. To this aim, this ALS2024 masterclass discusses basic data management techniques, version control measures, and issues relating to reproducible research.

This ALS2024 masterclass is designed to provide essential guidance on data management, transparency, and reproducibility for individuals working with language data. While it is accessible to all users, it focuses particularly on beginners and intermediate users of R, aiming to enhance their data management skills and utilize RStudio to make their analyses more transparent and reproducible.

The objective of this ALS2024 masterclass is to demonstrate fundamental data management strategies and exemplify selected methods that improve the reproducibility of analytic workflows. By following this ALS2024 masterclass, users will learn to implement best practices in data management, ensure their workflows are transparent, and make their results reproducible, thereby increasing the reliability and credibility of their research.

Furthermore, the ALS2024 masterclass will cover essential techniques such as version control with Git, using R Markdown for creating dynamic documents, strategies for organizing and documenting your code effectively, developing interactive Jupyter notebooks, and creating eBooks that are accessible via any browser. These methods are crucial for creating analyses that others can easily understand, verify, and build upon. By adopting these practices, you contribute to a more open and collaborative scientific community.

The entire R Notebook for the ALS2024 masterclass can be downloaded here. If you want to render the R Notebook on your machine, i.e. knitting the document to html or a pdf, you need to make sure that you have R and RStudio installed and you also need to download the bibliography file and store it in the same folder where you store the Rmd file.


In data science or when working with data, issues relating to organizing files and folders, managing data and projects, avoiding data loss, and efficient work flows are essential. The idea behind this ALS2024 masterclass is to address this issue and provide advice on how to handle data and creating efficient workflows.

Some of the contents of this ALS2024 masterclass build on the Digital Essentials module that is offered by the UQ library, the Reproducible Research resources (created by Griffith University’s Library and eResearch Services), and on Amanda Miotto’s Reproducible Reseach Things (see also here for an alternative version and here for the GitHub repo). You can find additional information on all things relating to computers, the digital world, and computer safety in the Digital Essentials course that is part of UQ’s library resources.