The Office of Information Technology is offering our popular Text Mining Practicum again! Members of the SMU community will gain an introduction to the tools needed for evaluating data from the shortest tweets to the largest repositories of scientific information. Participants will also get an introduction to R and the Tidyverse.
R is a programming language that is used by many academic disciplines to analyze and visualize large amounts of data. The Tidyverse is an ecosystem of libraries built on R that makes it useful for text mining. You don’t have to be a computer scientist to learn and utilize R – In fact, R is becoming quite popular in humanities fields.
This course is a nice complement to Dr. Michael Hahsler’s Introduction to R Programming course. While Dr. Hahsler’s course is oriented towards instruction on the R language itself, this course will focus on applying R and the Tidyverse to do text mining and related analysis. Don’t worry, Dr. Hahsler’s course is not a prerequisite.
Also, the skills learned in this course will place attendees well on the way to discerning – with quantitative tools – how discourses change over time and making quantitative claims about the most important terms, authors, or events in a changing discourse. Basically, they will learn how to look at the sheer amount of data in our lives and see how can we use it to answer burning questions and make big decisions.
Interested? Reserve your spot now, as seating is limited!
The practicum meets once weekly, for three hours at a time, for five weeks from 9 a.m. to 11:50 a.m. starting March 6, 2020. All participants will need to provide their own laptop running Windows, macOS, or Linux (Ubuntu, Debian, Fedora/Red Hat, SLES/OpenSUSE). Instructions on how to install R and Tidyverse will be provided. The popular online textbook Text Mining With R will be used for the course.
