About Me: Natalia
Education
•
2018–To date: PhD In Politics and International Relations (University
College D ublin)
Research Interests
• International Relations
• Critical Security Studies
• Computational Social Science
• Social Media Communication
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About Me: Stefan
Education and Positions
• 2015–2018: PhD in Political Science (Trinity College Dublin)
• 2019: Postdoctoral Researcher (University of Zurich)
• since 2020: Assistant Professor (University College Dublin)
Research Interests
• Party Competition
• Political Communication
• Public Opinion and Voting Behaviour
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Content
We will cover:
• Advantages of having a personal academic website
• Structure of the website:
• What information should be included
• Advantages and disadvantages of different themes
• How to create the website:
• Creating a new project
• Basic Markdown commands
• Basic HTML commands
• Working with the ‘config.toml’ file
• Adding content
• Personalizing the website
• How to deploy the website using GitHub
Connected_Politics Lab Workshop Series (Natalia Umansky Stefan Müller)
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Advantages of a Website
• Visibility
• Present your (published and) ongoing research
• Contact details
• Durability (researcher profiles on university websites change – or you
change the institution)
• It’s free or very cheap (if you add your custom domain)
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Your research:
• A PDF version of your CV
• List of your research projects
• Produce separate lists for publications, papers under review, working
pap ers, work in progress, etc.
• Attach PDF drafts of your working papers (if they have the required
standard)
• Provide links to published work
• Add abstracts
Your teaching experience:
• List of modules/courses/workshops you teach or taught in the past
• Where p ossible, add link to teaching materials
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Personal taste/advice: Keep it simple and professional:
• No nee d for very overly long bios
• No nee d for (background) photos, fancy colors or spectacular fonts
• No nee d for description of hobbies or free-time activities
• Make sure all central information can be found in less than 20
seconds (research, contact details, CV)
• Check that the website is displayed well on mobile devices
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Exercise #1: Create a new project
Breakout rooms:
• Introduce yourself (where are you based; what are you
studying/working on)
•
Repeat the steps to create a new R project for your website using the
‘Researcher’ theme
Questions?:Usementi.com (code: 88 29 53 7)
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Adding pictures and attachments to your website
Avatar picture and CV:
• To change the picture and the CV attached to the example website,
we must first add our own in the directory.
• Pictures and PDF files must be saved in the static folder.
• We can then change the file name in the file path.
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Exercise #2: Adding content
Breakout rooms:
• Introduce yourself (where are you based; what are you
studying/working on).
• Make changes to the config.toml file to add your name,
description, and manage the main menu.
• Add your bio by making some changes to the _index.md file.
Bonus: Create three sections: Research, Teaching, and CV (where you’ll
add content) and change the avatar picture to show your own.
Questions?:Usementi.com (code: 88 29 53 7)
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Building the website
• Store your scripts for the website in one folder
•
Create a separate folder and GitHub repository and name it like your
preferred GitHub domain (e.g. nataliaumansky.github.io)
• Run the following code after opening the website folder in your
RProject
library(blogdown)
# set directory where the built website is stored
options(blogdown.publishDir = ../nataliaumansky.github.io)
build_site()
serve_site()
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Pushing the website to GitHub
• Use GitHub Desktop (or RStudio) to push the repository
(nataliaumansky.github.io)toGitHub
• Go to github.com, selec t this repository, go to Settings and activate
GitHub pages
• Source: Branch: master; ‘/root“
• [Add custom domain (needs to be set up with the provider of the
domain)]
• Activate Enforce HTTPS
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