Graduate seminar "Quantitative text analysis with R"

During the Winter Semester 2012/13, a regular event aimed at introducing interested students and researchers to quantitative text analysis with the open source statistical programme R was held as a weekly graduate seminar by GCDH members Juan Garcés, Berenike Herrmann, and Joost Kremers at GU.

R. H. Baayen's book Analyzing linguistic data: a practical introduction to statistics using R (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008) was used as a text book. The seminar, which had a small but committed number of participants, served as an confirmation that R should become one of the core scripting languages/environments for statistical analysis, in general, and quantitative textual analysis, in particular. This served as a further encouragement to offer R workshops, such as the EADH-funded workshop "Stylometry with R", in the future. The format of the seminar will be carefully re-assessed in terms of the underlying pedagogical approach and is likely to be offered in and adapted form again in the future.