The UCSSR package offers teaching materials on using corpora in social science research for R users. At this stage, the package includes several vignettes which render into html slides. The slides are also hosted at the GitHub Pages of the UCSSR package.
UCSSR relies on the polmineR package and requires users to have basic R knowledge. At this stage of its development, the data used in examples is GermaParl, a corpus of debates in the German Bundestag. The language of the slides is German.
Slides are online, but there are two reasons for installing the package:
- you want to work with the slides offline;
- you want to have convenient access to the Rmarkdown files the slides are based on (see Usage).
To keep installation requirements minimal, the package is hosted via the drat repository of the PolMine Project.
install.packages("drat")
drat::addRepo("polmine")
install.packages("UCSSR")To be able to run examples, you will need an installation of the GermaParl corpus. It is shipped as a package and is available via the drat repository of the PolMine Project. Upon installation, the GermaParl package only includes minimal data for testing purposes. The full corpus can be downloaded after package installation from a webspace of the PolMine Project.
drat::addRepo("polmine")
install.packages("GermaParl")
GermaParl::germaparl_download_corpus()Packages used in the examples can be installed from CRAN.
pkgs <- c("devtools", "data.table", "xts", "lubridate", "DT")
install.packages(pkgs)If you prefer to build the html-slides yourself, install the package from GitHub.
devtools::install_github("PolMine/UCSSR")The slides()-function will open a slide in your default browser. Call
the function without any argument to learn which slides are
available.
UCSSR::slides()## Please indicate a topic. Available Rmarkdown files that the vignettes in this package are based on are:
## index.html / corpora.html / subcorpora.html / counting.html / kwic.html / cqp.html / sentiments.html
Indicate the topic to open the slide you want to use. The file extension (“.html”) can be omitted.
UCSSR::slides("corpora")If you want to run examples yourself, or if you want to copy code, play around with it, or re-use it for your own analysis, it may be convenient to open the Rmarkdown file the slide has been generated from. The function requires that you work in an RStudio session.
To learn which Rmarkdown files are available, call open_rmarkdown()
without any
argument.
UCSSR::open_rmarkdown()## Please indicate a topic. Available Rmarkdown files that the vignettes in this package are based on are:
## index.Rmd / corpora.Rmd / subcorpora.Rmd / counting.Rmd / kwic.Rmd / cqp.Rmd / sentiments.Rmd
Specify the topic of the Rmarkdown document to open it in your RStudio session. The file extensions can be omitted.
UCSSR::open_rmarkdown("kwic")Once you start modifying code in the examples, we strongly advise to save it to a different file, to avoid confusion if modified does not work any more.
The package is still at an early stage of its development. Planned steps are:
-
to expand the set of slides and to cover more topics;
-
to translate everything and to use an English corpus.
Eventually, the teaching material might develop into a book, but I am not yet sure how the (limited) interactivity can be maintained on paper.
The license of the package is the Creative Commoms license BY-NC-SA 4.0:
- BY: Authorship needs to be attributed;
- NC: Only non-commercial usage is allowed;
- SA: Share alike, anything derived from UCSSR may not be put under a less restrictive license than the original CC license.
If your research benefits from using UCSSR, I suggest to quote the package as follows.
Blätte, Andreas (2018): Using Corpora in Social Science Research (UCSSR). Available at: https:://https://polmine.github.io/UCSSR.