This course will give an introduction to handling, visualizing and analyzing linguistic data using R. We will cover the fundamentals of R programming, including data and control structures, import and export, idiomatic R coding practices, and text processing using regular expressions. We will explore the visualization package ggplot2, a powerful framework for exploring data graphically and for creating visually appealing publication-ready plots. Finally, we will deal with statistical tools commonly used for linguistic analysis today, including principal components analysis, regression models and classification and regression trees. We will discuss how to calculate, interpret and validate these analyses.

The class materials will be designed around common issues and pitfalls in linguistic analysis using R, and are intended to provide students with a tool set of methods and practical knowledge about using them. We will work with R in class, and students should bring a laptop if possible.