Create a new, empty research compendium, starting with an empty GitHub repository
Create a GitHub account, confirm your email, then go to https://github.com/new or click on the menu in the upper left of your GitHub home page, as you see in the image:
Take care to choose a memorable name that represents your research, such as some keywords from the title of your manuscript. The name needs to follow the rules for R package names: it can contain only ASCII letters, numbers, and ‘.’, it must have at least two characters, it must start with a letter (not a number), and it cannot end with ‘.’. You can add some text in the description field, and set the repo to be private if you wish. Do not 'Initialize this repository with a README' or add any other files on this page, those will interfere with later steps. Click 'Create Repository' when you are finished here.
Select the URL to this page, and copy it so you can paste it later. In this example the URL is https://github.com/benmarwick/demo. At this point, we are finished with GitHub for now, and we will move to work on RStudio on our computer
We will download, or clone, our empty GitHub repository into this new project. Click on the new project menu in the upper right to start a new project in RStudio. RStudio projects are helpful because they help us to manage our project's the working directory. This helps to make our project portable (so it works on other computers) and can save a lot of confusion when reading and writing files.
We recommend you do not change the 'Project directory name'. If this is different from your GitHub repository name it can cause confusion. You can change the subdirectory location to somewhere suitable on your computer (in this example it is ~/Desktop). Click the Browse button to select a different subdirectory.
