Syllabus

Author

Peter Gilles

1 Language Analytics in R

Seminar in the Doctoral School HSS at the University of Luxembourg | Summer semester 2026

Initial steps:

install R
install RStudio
install these packages in RStudio: tidyverse, languageR, tidytext, quanteda, quanteda.textmodels, quanteda.textplots, quanteda.textstats, quanteda.tidy, gutenbergr

1.1 Syllabus

Five sessions

Introduction:
1. Examples from own research
2. First steps in Rstudio, packages and basic constructs (workflow, variables, scripting in Rmarkdown; writing good code)
3. Work with text data and corpora (data import etc.)
4. Hands-on exercises on toy data
Data wrangling
1. tidyverse
Corpus analysis with tidytext and quanteda
Visualisation and basic statistics with ggplot2
Work on own projects

1.2 Resources and recommended reading

(Levshina 2015)

(Schneider 2024)

(Winter 2020) (https://appliedstatisticsforlinguists.org/bwinter_stats_proofs.pdf)

R for Data Science (2e)

https://www.tidytextmining.com/

https://eleanorchodroff.com/r-for-linguists/

https://jofrhwld.github.io/AandS500_2023/

https://jofrhwld.github.io/2023_Lin611/

https://jofrhwld.github.io/teaching/courses/2017_lsa/

https://alvinntnu.github.io/NTNU_ENC2036_LECTURES/

1.3 R cheatsheets

https://posit.co/resources/cheatsheets/

https://cran.r-project.org/doc/contrib/Short-refcard.pdf

1.4 Stilometrics

https://computationalstylistics.github.io/

1.5 AI tools

querychat

References

Levshina, Natalia. 2015. How to Do Linguistics with R: Data Exploration and Statistical Analysis. Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing Company. https://doi.org/10.1075/z.195;

Schneider, Gerold. 2024. Text analytics for corpus linguistics and digital humanities: simple R scripts and tools. Language, data science and digital humanities. London: Bloomsbury.

Winter, Bodo. 2020. Statistics for Linguists: An Introduction Using r. London: Routledge. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/9781315165547.