I led this workshop as part of the Intelligent Informatics @ Bloustein webinar series at Rutgers, aimed at researchers and students in the Bloustein School who wanted to start using GitHub in their academic work. I delivered it in my role as Research Computing Specialist at the Rutgers Urban and Civic Informatics Lab (RUCI Lab).
The session started from zero — creating an account, understanding what repositories and commits actually are — and built up to the features that make GitHub genuinely useful for academic data science. I covered how to organize research projects in repositories, use version control to track changes in analysis code, and collaborate with co-authors without the usual mess of emailing files back and forth.
From there I got into the parts of GitHub that most researchers don’t know about. GitHub Actions lets you automate data collection on a schedule — scrape a website nightly, pull updated datasets, regenerate visualizations — all without touching a server. I showed how to set up these pipelines and how to pair them with RMarkdown for reports that update themselves. I also walked through GitHub Pages, which gives you free web hosting straight from a repository, useful for publishing project sites, portfolios, or course materials.
No prior programming experience was required. The audience ranged from planning and public policy grad students to faculty, so I kept the examples grounded in the kinds of work people at Bloustein actually do — tracking changes to a thesis analysis, sharing replication code for a journal submission, hosting a project website for a grant. I also drew on material from my graduate courses in the Master of Public Informatics Program, where I’d been teaching these same workflows to students heading into data-heavy public sector and nonprofit careers.
Related Projects
Several of my own projects use the techniques covered in this workshop:
- COVID-19 Visualization — automated data updates via GitHub Actions
- OPRAmachine — open-source development and collaboration on GitHub
- zipcodeR Package — R package published and maintained through GitHub
About the Author
