Dear colleagues, 

We are happy to invite you to the January instalment of the DiMES workshop series. 

On January 29-30 (Thursday to Friday), 2026, Dr. Fabio Votta (University of Amsterdam) will teach a two-day in-person workshop on creating software for research in R (see below for a short overview). The workshop is primarily open to the PhD students, postdocs, and faculty of FB PolSoz. In addition, please consider inviting advanced students with a specific interest in the topic.

The workshop is funded by DiMES and offered free of cost to participants. However, we do require reliable registration to plan the workshop. To register, please fill out this form by January 23rd, 2026. We plan to offer up to 20 seats. If registrations exceed the limit, PolSoz PhD students and postdocs will be given preference, and the remainder of the seats will be distributed first-come, first-serve. 

If you have any questions about this workshop, please reach out to Vivien Fabry at v.fabry@fu-berlin.de . 

Best,

Vivien (and Bruno & Marko)

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Overview

In this two-day, in-person workshop, Dr. Fabio Votta (University of Amsterdam) will introduce social science researchers to building research software in R, with a focus on turning analysis code into reusable R packages and creating interactive dashboards to communicate results (using dashboardr).  

The workshop is designed to help participants move from “scripts that work once” to well-structured, documented, and shareable tools that support transparent, collaborative, and reproducible research workflows. Across short lectures and hands-on exercises, we will cover two core subjects: 

• Building research software in R: package structure, functions and interfaces, documentation, testing, and practical workflow patterns. 

• Building dashboards with dashboardr: creating lightweight, interactive views that help explore, present, and maintain analyses.

By the end, participants will have a clear roadmap, and working templates, for packaging their own research code and publishing results in a clean, user-friendly format. Prerequisites / audience: PhD students, postdocs, and faculty (and advanced students with strong interest). Participants should be comfortable writing basic R code; bringing a laptop is required. 

Fabio Votta is a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Amsterdam (Amsterdam School of Communication Research). His research focuses on digital election campaigns, specifically data-driven campaigning and political microtargeting, and the role of generative AI. He is known for his passion for data visualization and communicating insights from data to a broader audience using R.