Play with Your Data Session: A Workshop on “R” for Humanists
Many digital humanists are discovering the power and flexibility of “R.” DMDH is fortunate to have Leigh Fisher, a graduate student in BioStatistics, lead this workshop and help to field questions. We've also recently begun an informal survey circulating on Twitter in an effort to gather information about how humanists are using R, and as a way to investigate the many ways in which it is implemented in course instruction or taught through workshops like ours.
Because R does have a steep learning curve, our workshop is intended to be only an introduction to R's basic functionality and interdisciplinary applications. A link to the slides can be found at the bottom of this post. In addition to these slides, you'll find a short, yet immensely useful, list of resources for further instruction and inquiry, with the most strongly recommended being Coursera's 4-week course on R taught by two professors from John Hopkins's Department of Biostatistics, which is a part of their data science certificate program.
Useful links:
- Statistical methods for studying literature using R (A tutorial by Jeff Rydberg-Cox of university of Missouri-Kansas City)
- Executing R in php (Matthew Jockers)
- Sample R script to generate scatterplot from CSV input
- David Birnbaum’s DH Tools page
- Coursera course on R
Texts:
- Anthony Kenny's The Computation of Style: An Introduction to Statistics for Students of Literature and the Humanities
- J.F. Burrows'Computation into Criticism: A Study of Jane Austen’s Novels
- Douglas Biber's Corpus Linguistics: Investigating Language Structure and Use
- R.H. Baayen's Analyzing Linguistic Data: A Practical Introduction to Statistics Using R
- Matt Jocker's Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature
- Stefan Gries' Statistics for Linguistics with R
- ” ” Quantitative Corpus Linguistics with R