Summary and Setup

This is an example lesson created during Collaborative Lesson Development Training June 2022.

  • prerequisite skill/knowledge 1: basic R knowledge
  • prerequisite skill/knowledge 2: concept of tidy data and basic commands of the package tidyverse

Data Sets

This lesson uses the data sets from the Gutenberg Project collection, which is a collection of text in public domain. It is a good source to practice text mining techniques. We will install the package gutenbergr, download the books and metadata in the class.

Software Setup

Details

R and RStudio are separate downloads and installations. R is the underlying statistical computing environment, but using R alone is no fun. RStudio is a graphical integrated development environment (IDE) that makes using R much easier and more interactive. You need to install R before you install RStudio. Once installed, because RStudio is an IDE, RStudio will run R in the background. You do not need to run it separately.

After installing both programs, you will need to install the tidyverse package from within RStudio. The tidyverse package is a powerful collection of data science tools within R see the tidyverse website for more details. Follow the instructions below for your operating system, and then follow the instructions to install tidyverse.

If you already have R and RStudio installed,

  1. Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  2. To check which version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears in the console indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, you can update R using the installr package, by running:

R 

if( !("installr" %in% installed.packages()) ){install.packages("installr")}
installr::updateR(TRUE)

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed,

  1. Download R from the CRAN website.
  2. Run the .exe file that was just downloaded.
  3. Go to the RStudio download page.
  4. Under All Installers select RStudio-yyyy.mm.v-xxx.exe (where y, m, v, and x represent version numbers).
  5. Double click the file to install it.
  6. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

If you already have R and RStudio installed

  1. Open RStudio, and click on “Help” > “Check for updates”. If a new version is available, quit RStudio, and download the latest version for RStudio.
  2. To check the version of R you are using, start RStudio and the first thing that appears on the terminal indicates the version of R you are running. Alternatively, you can type sessionInfo(), which will also display which version of R you are running. Go on the CRAN website and check whether a more recent version is available. If so, please download and install it. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.2.

If you don’t have R and RStudio installed

  1. Download R from the CRAN website.

  2. Select the .pkg file for the latest R version.

  3. Double click on the downloaded file to install R.

  4. It is also a good idea to install XQuartz (needed by some packages).

  5. Go to the RStudio download page.

  6. Under Installers select RStudio-yyyy.mm.v-xxx.dmg (where y, m, v, and x represent version numbers).

  7. Double click the file to install RStudio.

  8. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.

  9. questions are displayed at the beginning of the episode to prime the learner for the content.

  10. objectives are the learning objectives for an episode displayed with the questions.

  11. keypoints are displayed at the end of the episode to reinforce the objectives.

  1. Follow the instructions for your distribution from CRAN, they provide information to get the most recent version of R for common distributions. For most distributions, you could use your package manager (e.g., for Debian/Ubuntu run sudo apt-get install r-base, and for Fedora sudo yum install R), but we don’t recommend this approach as the versions provided by this approach are usually out of date. In any case, make sure you have at least R 3.2.
  2. Go to the RStudio download page.
  3. Under Installers select the version that matches your distribution, and install it with your preferred method (e.g., with Debian/Ubuntu sudo dpkg -i rstudio-yyyy.mm.v-xxx-amd64.deb at the terminal).
  4. Once it’s installed, open RStudio to make sure it works and you don’t get any error messages.
  5. Before installing the tidyverse package, Ubuntu (and related) users may need to install the following dependencies: libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev (e.g. sudo apt install libcurl4-openssl-dev libssl-dev libxml2-dev).

After installing R and RStudio, you need to install the tidyverse, tidytext, and gutenbergr packages.

  • After starting RStudio, at the console type: install.packages("tidyverse") followed by the enter key. Once this has installed, type install.packages("tidytext") followed by the enter key. Once this has installed, type install.packages("gutenbergr") followed by the enter key. All three packages should now be installed.