Programming in LaTeX for Social Scientific Document Preparation

The course aims to present LaTeX, a widely-used document preparation system, in a way that's accessible to graduate students in the social sciences.

LaTeX is an open-source alternative to software such as Microsoft Office. It lets 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 documents of over 200 pages with graphs, tables, footnotes, and cross-references. It is not based on templates and predefined 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 together through all the steps necessary to create a typical document encountered in graduate school: a conference or class paper. By the end of the course, participants should be able to use LaTeX to create by themselves a paper with all its elements: title, abstract, text, tables and graphs, references and appendices, and even a 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, to produce high-quality, publication-ready tables of results with minimal work. We will go through the use of LaTeX for dissertations and other similarly large documents, and see how smoothly it can handle cross-references and complex document structures. Finally, we will see how to use LaTeX to create a class or conference presentation by using the Beamer class. 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.

Session 1

We 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. You will see how to get additional features for your document using LaTeX packages. These constitute necessary steps in any document and the goal of this Session is to show that they can easily be performed with LaTeX in an intuitive way. You'll also learn how to make basic use of TeXStudio, an intuitive, free and feature-rich interface for LaTeX. TeXStudio contains a number of helpful commands for reducing the work in a number of document formatting tasks. We will finish the Session by going through the stages of creating a table in LaTeX.

Session 2

We recap the most important steps for creating a table in LaTeX, look at examples of slightly more advanced table formats, and see how images/graphs can be added to our practice paper. You will learn how LaTeX can build complex table structures, such as for regression results, and regression comparison tables. I will demonstrate how R and Stata can be paired with LaTeX, so that analysis results can quickly be exported in the proper format. This does away with the need for manual copy/paste, reduces mistakes, and saves precious time. Finally, I'll show you how to add cross-references to improve navigation, and how to convert a LaTeX document to Word.

Session 3

We look at the final components of an academic paper: citations and bibliography. I will show how easy it is to create lengthier documents, such as dissertations, in LaTeX. In this case the document structure will be a bit different to that of an article, but I will show how the commands used to format an article can easily work for a book. We finish with using LaTeX to create Beamer slides for class presentations or conferences. You'll see how the same commands can be used to obtain itemized lists and sections, and to add tables, graphs, and bibliographies.

Due to time constraints I will not show you how to use LaTeX for writing mathematical formulas and equations, or how to create graphs and charts natively within LaTeX. I will focus on creating an academic paper from beginning to end in LaTeX, and on giving you the troubleshooting skills to advance on your own after the course. This is an introductory course; please do not take it if you have already written basic documents with it LaTeX and wish to learn advanced features.

No prerequisites are needed to attend this class. Familiarity with HTML or any other markup language would help you understand more quickly how LaTeX works, but is not essential. LaTeX operates with identical commands for Mac, Windows and Linux so there are no restrictions on who can attend. For each session I have indicated readings, but these are not mandatory given the practical nature of the class. Even so, you are encouraged to use them as reference texts when embarking on using LaTeX on your own.

None. 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.