Introduction to Markdown for Research Data Management

This workshop is an introduction to Markdown and how it can be used in Research Data Management. Markdown is a simple and easy-to-use markup language to format virtually any document. Research data management (RDM) covers practices associated with the collection, documentation, storage, sharing, and preservation of all research data. It involves the active organization and maintenance of data throughout the entire research process, which includes the periods before, during, and after the active research phase. When sharing your work, we usually create documentation that guides our team members and future collaborators. Markdown is a great tool to use to create readable and maintainable documentation to facilitate the research process.

Many kinds of documents can be created with Markdown:

• Data management plan
• Lab manual
• Team Wiki
• Reserach protocol
• README
• Data cleaning plan
• Data dictionary

Research Commons is offering bite-size workshops that are 30 minutes each during lunchtime. By going through our interactive, self-paced, and hands-on mini-workshops, you will learn the basics of Markdown for RDM from the following core components:

• Introduction to Markdown

This workshop will help you get started with Markdown (including setting up) and teach you what it is, how it works, and what you can do with it.

• Create a README with Markdown

This workshop will introduce the basics of Markdown syntax by helping you create a README document.

• Extended Markdown

This workshop builds on the previous workshop and will show you more advanced features of Markdown.

Pre-workshop set up

You really do not need anything to get started with Markdown, as the syntax was created so that it is readable and unobtrusive. The text in the file can be read even if it isn’t rendered. However, if you would like to preview the formatted document in real time, you can use Visual Studio Code.

Further, we suggest that you set up the Doc Writer profile template to install useful extensions for documentation writing, such as a spell checker, Markdown linter, and word count.

You can find and sign up for scheduled Data Bites workshops here.

This workshop series was developed by Eugene Barsky and Andrew Li.