R is a powerful scripting language for data handling, data visualisation, and statistics. 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. 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.
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.
More information
The workshop Introduction to R & Data for Humanities will take place online. There is a limit of 30 participants for the workshop. You will receive a confirmation following registration via email. A week before the workshop takes place you will receive all the information you need in order to participate 2 November. If you have any questions, please contact Puck Wildschut, subject librarian Digital Humanities.