Introduction to R: Data Analysis and Statistics

24/09/2015

From 22-23 September 2015, the LVTC team hosted a seminar on Data Analysis and Statistics with the open-source software tool ‘R’. The seminar was held by David Lorenz, lecturer and postdoc researcher at the Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg (Germany), and David Tizón-Couto, lecturer and postdoc researcher for the LVTC team.

The open-source software ‘R’ is increasingly popular in the linguistics community as it offers a wealth of possibilities for working with quantitative linguistic data, be it from corpora, questionnaires or experiments. Its main uses are in descriptive and analytical statistics as well as data visualization. The course provided a hands-on introduction to R as well as an overview of basic statistical methods. Day one covered basic commands and inferential statistics, while day two focused on concordancing and means of data visualization: graphs, plots, etc. The participants had the opportunity to bring in their own data to be used as examples of the analytical tools available in ‘R’.

Dr. David Lorenz belongs to the first generation of scholars to have completed his dissertation within the research training group “Frequency Effects in Language” (2009-2012) at the University of Freiburg. As part of this programme, and in his current research, he has made extensive use of ‘R’ and has taught several seminars on research methods and statistics. David Tizón-Couto was a visiting postdoc researcher at the University of Freiburg during 2013-2014. He was cofounder and part of the “RnB group”, a weekly seminar devoted to practising linguistic analysis by means of ‘R’ which is ran by Dr. Lorenz.

We are very grateful to Dr. Lorenz for his visit and for such a successful and productive seminar. Thank you!