R Workbook: Novice to Social Scientist

R Workbook

A hands-on guide to R for content analysis research

Seven chapters take you from building a codebook to publishing a professional White Paper, with narrated video walkthroughs for every chapter.

What You’ll Learn

This workbook is your companion for the R programming portion of the course (Phases III–V). Each chapter builds on the previous one, following the same dataset through the full research pipeline: the Twitch corpus that ships inside the course v2v package, 35,267 chat messages and 32,276 stream snapshots drawn from fifty channels over five and a half days of November 2018.

Chapter Title What You’ll Do
1 Codebook Turn qualitative observations into numeric codes
2 Data Collection Code your full sample with consistency checks
3 Meet R Set up R and your VS Code workspace
4 Data Wrangling Import, clean, and export your dataset
5 Describing Data Build frequency tables and publication-ready charts
6 Inferencing Data Run chi-square tests and interpret results
7 Publishing Assemble your White Paper as a Quarto Book

How to Use This Workbook

TipWatch, Then Do

Every chapter opens with a narrated video walkthrough. Watch it first to get the big picture, then work through the written content at your own pace. The video and text cover the same material, so use whichever format helps you learn.

  1. Watch the video at the top of each chapter
  2. Follow along in VS Code, the code blocks are designed to run in order
  3. Use the class dataset for practice: library(v2v), then twitch_chat() and twitch_streams(), with no file to download
  4. Apply to your own data for the White Paper

Reference

Need the Workbook Offline?

The workbook is also available as a standalone Quarto Book. Download it from the Resources page or install the course R package to open the project files directly in VS Code.