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An Introduction to R for Digital Historians

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DHSS, 20 June 2017

Yannick Rochat

Junior Lecturer, UNIL

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Some of my R projects…

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http://yro.ch/l-age-moyen-des-parlementaires-suisses/

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What is R?

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Who created it?

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Who is using it?

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What about R and History?

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The Programming Historian

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Afanador-Llach et al. (eds.) (2017)

http://programminghistorian.org/

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Humanities Data in R

Exploring Networks, Geospatial Data, Images, and Text

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Arnold & Tilton (2015) http://humanitiesdata.org/

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(You can find it on libgen btw.)

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Computational Historical Thinking

Lincoln Mullen

http://dh-r.lincolnmullen.com/

(in progress)

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Why computational history?

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  • Scale
  • Frame questions differently
  • Make sources legible
  • Interactivity

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Lincoln Mullen’s datasets for historians

https://github.com/ropensci/historydata

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Is R the only option?

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Of course not…

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… but the community is lively, ever growing, and super nice…

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https://hackernoon.com/which-programming-languages-have-the-happiest-and-angriest-commenters-ebe91b3852ed

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General Introduction

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https://www.rstudio.com/online-learning/#R

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It’s an interpreted language

… meaning you can read it.

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And with the pipes…

… you can even read it from left to right. (Might not seem cool but really, it is.)

http://r4ds.had.co.nz/pipes.html

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«How I learnt to code in one year»

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https://www.davidbauer.ch/2013/01/02/how-i-learnt-to-code-in-one-year/

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Where/How do I use R?

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Console (meh…)

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R GUI (better)

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… or RStudio (great for beginners)

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In particular, RStudio provides notebooks.

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You can make computation inside of the script…

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… export a webpage…

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… or even export slides.

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RStudio cheat sheets

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Now, let’s move to the notebook

of this course and practice.