Benefits of Dynamic Documents

'Dynamic Documents' are projects or papers that are developed using prominent tools such as R-markdown or JuPyTer notebooks (the two most prominent tools).

The salient features and benefits of this approach include:

• Integrated data analysis and reporting means the data analysis (as well as math/simulations) is done and reported in the same space that the results and discussion are presented. This is made possible through the concealment of 'code blocks'.

• Transparent reporting means you can track exactly what is being reported and how it was constructed:

  • Making the process a lot less error-prone

  • Helping readers understand it better (see 'explorable explanations')

  • Helping replicators and future researchers build on it

• Other advantages of these formats (over PDFs for example) include:

  • Convenient ‘folding blocks’

  • Margin comments

  • Hoverable notes and links

  • Integrating interactive tools

Better examples, the case for dynamic documents

QuartoQuarto

Communicating with Interactive ArticlesDistill

Explorable Explanationsworrydream.com

Also consider...

• Elife's 'editable graphics'... Brett Viktor?

• see corrigendum in journals Reinhart and Rogoff error?

• open science MOOC in R markdown ...

• OSF and all of their training/promo materials in OS

Reinstein's own examples

Some quick examples from my own work in progress (but other people have done it much better)

1 Introduction: Effective giving, responses to analytical ‘effectiveness information’ | Impact of impact treatments on giving: field experiments and synthesisdaaronr.github.io

4 Donation | EA survey analyses (partial)rethinkpriorities.github.io

Other (randomly selected) examples

Assessing the Proportional Odds Assumption and Its Impact – Statistical ThinkingStatistical Thinking

Sentiment Analysis of 49 years of Warren Buffett’s Letters to Shareholders of Berkshire Hathawaybookdown.org

Probabilistic Effects of a Play-In Tournamentbookdown.org