Programming in LaTeX for Social Scientific Document Preparation

The course aims to present LaTeX, a widely-used document preparation system, in an accessible way to an audience of graduate students in the social sciences. LaTeX is an open-source alternative to software such as Microsoft Office, letting you create a wide array of document formats: conference papers, books or dissertations, letters, presentation slides, and even handouts. It is free and can handle large documents without any problems (over 150 or 200 pages) with graphs, tables, footnotes, and cross-references. It performs document or text formatting based on templates and pre-defined rules, freeing the user from all concerns apart from the content itself. Finally, it does not have issues with software versions, or document compatibility, making it an ideal environment for collaboration.

This is structured as an applied class, where we will go through together all the steps necessary to create a typical document encountered in graduate school: a conference paper. By the end of the class, participants should be able to use LaTeX to create by themselves a paper with all its elements: title, text, tables and graphs, references and appendices, table of contents. We will see a brief demo of how LaTeX can be integrated, in the case of quantitative analyses, with software such as Stata and R, so as to produce high-quality, publication-ready tables of results with minimal work. Finally, we will go through the use of LaTeX for dissertations and other similarly large documents, and how smoothly it can handle cross-references and complex document structures. Special attention is given to tricks users can rely on to troubleshoot problems by themselves, with the use of web forums and textbooks. This should allow participants to continue progressing with LaTeX on their own, even after the Winter School is over. In the first session, we will gain basic familiarity with how LaTeX works, and learn the most basic aspects of document writing: using the template for a conference article, adding section headings and paragraphs, formatting the text, and changing the document margins. Finally, participants will see how to get additional features for their document through the use of LaTeX packages. These constitute necessary steps in any document and the goal of this section is to show that they can easily be performed with LaTeX in an intuitive way. Participants will also learn how to make basic use of TeXStudio, an intuitive, free and feature-rich interface for LaTeX.

In the second session we focus on how tables and images/graphs can be added to our practice paper. Starting from very simple examples and gradually building up, participants will learn how LaTeX can build complex table structures (e.g. regression results). We also go through how to include figures and images in the paper, and format them based on our needs. In this session I will also demonstrate the ways in which R and Stata can be paired with LaTeX, so that analysis results can quickly be exported in the proper format. This negates the need for manual copy/paste, reduces mistakes, and saves precious time for users.

In the third and final session we devote attention to the final components of an academic paper: adding citations and managing the bibliography. Here we also discuss how to use cross-references (to tables or graphs) in the body of the paper so as to make complex documents more manageable. Finally, I will show how easy it is to create in LaTeX lengthier documents, such as dissertations. This truly represents a strong reason for participants to adopt LaTeX in their work, as other document editing software pale in comparison to LaTeX’s abilities. We conclude the course with a short demo of the software’s more advanced features, such as the ability to create reproducible documents (papers or slides) in combination with a statistical software, designing slides for presentations, and converting LaTeX files to common formats such as HTML or RTF, for use with other software (including Word).

Due to time constraints we are not able to cover the following topics: the use of LaTeX for writing mathematical formulae and equations or how to create graphs and charts natively within LaTeX. Furthermore, the topics of reproducible documents, creating slides, and converting LaTeX files to HTML will only be presented as a short demo (perhaps 15 minutes each). The focus will constantly be on creating an academic paper from beginning to end in LaTeX, and on giving students the troubleshooting skills to advance on their own with the software. This is an introductory class, and therefore is bound to disappoint potential participants who already have introductory knowledge of LaTeX (e.g. have written at least a basic document with it) and wish to learn advanced features.

No prerequisites are needed to attend this class. Familiarity with HTML or any other markup language would help participants understand quicker how LaTeX works, but is not essential to be able to adequately assimilate the material. Given that LaTeX operates with identical commands for any operating system (Mac, Windows, Linux) there are no restrictions on who can attend from this perspective. For each session I have indicated a set of readings, but these are not mandatory given the practical nature of the class. Even so, participants are encouraged to use these readings as reference texts and helpful resources when embarking on using LaTeX on their own.

No prerequisite knowledge is required to attend this class. As long as you’re familiar with how a basic text editor works (Notepad, Gedit, SublimeText, Notepad++, even Vim or Emacs) you’re good to go.