R is a powerful scripting language for data handling, data visualization, and statistics. In this workshop, we aim to give you the tools to start exploring R and all it has to offer by yourself. We focus on learning the basics of R and applying your new found R knowledge and skills to texts. This workshop specifically targets researchers working within the Humanities, focusing on the analysis of textual data (as found in poems and novels, for example). However, it is open to and useful for all UU employees who want to perform computational textual analyses.
The course will take you from the very basics in R syntax, to data handling and visualisation using a set of tools known as the ‘tidyverse’. You will learn how to perform text mining using the ‘tidytext’ package, enabling you to handle your own data in a clean, robust, and reproducible manner. We will work in RStudio and introduce R as well as R Markdown: this is a great way to combine code and its output with text, allowing you to code in a narrative and intuitive way. Moreover, this way you produce a human-readable document with which you can easily share and showcase your work.
At the end of the course you will be able to:
- read and write lines of R code (even if you do not understand all functions, you know how to look them up);
- understand what ‘tidy’ text data is, how to generate it, and work with it;
- perform basic text mining and sentiment analysis, calculate important terms in a (set of) texts and relationships between words;
- use RStudio, and use it to write an R script and an R markdown document.
| Time | Activity |
|---|---|
| 9:00 | Walk-in, tech support |
| 9:30 | Introductions |
| 10:00 | Short intro to the course (on text mining & Tidyverse) |
| 10:15 | Base R: Exercises 1-3 |
| 11:15 | Recap & Questions |
| 11:30 | Coffee break |
| 11:45 | Base R: Exercises 4-6 |
| 12:45 | Recap & Questions |
| 13:00 | Lunch break |
| 13:45 | The Tidy Text Format & Sentiment Analysis: Exercises 7-9 |
| 14:45 | Recap & Questions |
| 15:00 | Coffee break |
| 15:15 | Analyzing word and document frequency & Relationships between words: Exercises 10-12 |
| 16:15 | Recap & Questions |
| 16:30 | If needed, extra time for Recap & Questions + individual assistance |
| 17:00 | Doei |