Better introduction to Socsim in the readme

[tomthe]

Bevore the sections on how to install and run rsocsim, we should have a section that explains what socsim and rsocsim actually are.

First, very rough draft:

About Socsim and rsocsim

Socsim stands for Social Simulator.
It is a microsimulation software to simulate populations and their kinship structure.

...explanation of what it actually does: Socsim creates a population of individual agents (persons) from input files. It then applies the events "marriage", "childbirth", "death", etc. based on rates that the user provides. It saves the growing kinship network as output....
...marriage markets? migration? what else?

...explanation of what is possible with this stuff... with examples...
users can then analyse the virtual population and the complete kinship structure...

... a bit of history and making clear that this is something established...
Socsims first version was developed in the 1970ies in Fortran... rewritten in C in the 80 ... used for countless cool papers throughout the last 50 years... examples...

... and now we (who?) will maintain socsim for the next years. We refactored the code a bit so that it runs on every operating system. We packaged it now into an R-package together with some useful functions that are often needed in working with the in- and output of socsim, so that it is much easier to get started.

[alburezg]

I tried to address these issues in my new pool request. A couple of other thins that we should look into for the README:

• You write: “You can find the most up-to-date binary release on https://github.com/tomthe/rsoc/releases”. Should we move all resources the the MPIDR github and delte the tomthe/rsoc repository to avoid confusion?
• The Getting started section is very useful but we should add more detail: where do the rates come from? What are we simulating? Specify that we included some 'demo' data with the package. Same with cousindiversity data.
• Add to the practical example code that read the output using read_opop, read_omar?

[tomthe]

Should we move all resources the the MPIDR github and delte the tomthe/rsoc repository to avoid confusion?

yes, I will change it to "archived" and link to this repository on top of the readme

The Getting started section is very useful but we should add more detail: where do the rates come from? What are we simulating? Specify that we included some 'demo' data with the package. Same with cousindiversity data.

yes, I agree. This needs to be fleshed out. I will look over it soon.

Add to the practical example code that read the output using read_opop, read_omar?

yes! I need to add that code to the package first!

[elinw]

One thing to consider is putting some of that material into vignettes. Those will show up as "articles" on your pkgdown site.