ggplot2 is a powerful and well-known data visualization package for R. But do you know what gg stands for? It actually refers to the Grammar of Graphics, a conceptual framework for understanding and constructing graphs. The core idea behind the Gramm...

In this lesson on sentiment analysis in R, you will learn how to perform sentiment analysis using the sentimentr package. To demonstrate the use of the package, you will compare the sentiment in the speeches of Adolf Hitler and Franklin Roosevelt abo...

In this lesson you will learn the basics of webscraping with the rvest R package. To demonstrate how it works, you will extract three speeches by Adolf Hitler from Wikipedia pages and analyze their word frequencies! 1. What is webscraping? Simply ...

1. What is R? R is a programming language and an environment for statistical computing and visualization. R is not a general-purpose programming language, like Python or Java, because its focus is on statistical computing. The language is very popul...

1. What is a treemap? A treemap consists of a set of rectangles which represent different categories in your data and whose size is defined by a numeric value associated with the respective category. For example, a treemap could illustrate the conti...

1. What is a violin plot? A violin plot is a mirrored density plot that is rotated 90 degrees as shown in the picture. It depicts the distribution of numeric data. 2. When should you use a violin plot? A violin plot is useful to compare the ...

Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! Was there an association or relationship between gender and the verdicts in investigations in 18th-century London? If an inquest concerned a man, did this fact influence the final verdict of the in...

Discovering 18th century London with new fonts Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! In this lesson, we delve into the world of data visualization with a focus on the use of different fonts in ggplot2. We are going to learn how to t...

AI in R and Python Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! Welcome to this enlightening journey to extract historical data from the Web using AI! In this lesson, we delve into the innovative ways of harnessing the power of ChatGPT to ...

Introduction Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! Ever imagined a world where any computer with an internet browser could be your playground for programming in R? Believe it, because this is your reality! Google Colab enables you t...

Introduction ‘Space is to place as eternity is to time.’ Joseph Joubert Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! In the realm of data science, the ability to visualize geospatial data is paramount. This is particularly true when wo...

Introduction ‘Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know’ A character in Ernest Hemingway’s novel “The Garden of Eden” Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! In this lesson, we will learn how to evaluate the relat...

Introduction “Qualitative flesh on quantitative bones.” Sidney Tarrow Greetings, humanists, social and data scientists! As our world grows increasingly data-driven, novel methods emerge that allow us to explore present and past social pheno...

Introduction “Historians offer us systems of the past that are too complete, series of causes and effects that are too exact and too clear to have ever been entirely true.” Marguerite Yourcenar - Mémoires d`Hadrien (1974) Greetings, humanists,...

Introduction “The normal distribution describes the manner in which many phenomena vary around a central value that represents their most probable outcome” Leonard Mlodinow In this lesson, we will dive into the concept of the normal distributi...

Introduction “We don’t need no education.” Pink Floyd In this lesson we will use data of the General Social Survey (1972-1978) to study American society in the seventies. In particular, we would like to study schooling duration for individuals...

Introduction ‘War is over, if you want it, war is over, now’ John Lennon Have you ever seen a webpage where text and visualizations do not have the right contrast or where colors do not match? I have had this experience and I have to admit tha...

Introduction ‘Intuition is a very powerful thing, more powerful than intellect’ Steve Jobs Linear regression is one of the most popular tools in social data science. It has been used over the last decades to study how variables relate to each ot...

Introduction ‘Global warming isn’t a prediction. It is happening.’ James Hansen There is indisputable evidence that our planet is warming at an abnormal rate. The effects of global warming already started to affect the Earth. Melting glaciers, s...

Introduction ‘Information is not knowledge’ Albert Einstein With so much data available nowadays, I frequently feel overwhelmed when I have to find data to study a subject. Is this dataset reliable? How was the data treated? Where can I find the...