R Package

Since we’re using R for this course, I’m putting the materials for it online as an R “package.” That means a bundle of code and data that you can install to your local computer and use.

To use this, you’ll need to install R and the RStudio environment that it uses. Some instructions I think should work for this are here

That package is online at https://github.com/HumanitiesDataAnalysis/HumanitiesDataAnalysis. But in general, there should be no reason to access it there; instead, you will install it within Rstudio on your machine or on any machine you work on. (The computers in Data Services at Bobst, for example, should have RStudio on them; you can just pull up this website, run the code below, and have the basic things you need to work with in this class.

The purpose of this is twofold.

We’re going to learn how to do some basic things that it will be simpler to just have code that does again and again.
I’m going to distribute a lot of data of various sorts, and this provides a simple way for getting it on to your computer.

if(!require(remotes)) {install.packages("remotes")}
remotes::install_github("HumanitiesDataAnalysis/HumanitiesDataAnalysis", update = FALSE)

There are a few other R packages associated with this course that we’ll use as we go along, by me and others. They will be installed in similar ways.

In general, you’ll then be able to start working by adding the following text to the beginning of your code (make sure it’s inside an R Markdown block.)

library(HumanitiesDataAnalysis)
library(tidyverse)

Remember to keep this on hand; you will probably need to rerun some of these command quite often.