Using R for visualizing & analyzing political data

This page contains materials for the workshop on "Research methods for studying political violence, conflict & cooperation" in POL 452-W.

• Instructions for installing software prior to the workshop
• Presentation slides
• R script used during the workshop
• Data used during the workshop (click through for Dropbox link; choose "Direct download")

Credit and thanks to the authors of the following materials that I used or remixed in this workshop:

• OpenIntro Statistics, an open-source textbook for introductory statistics
• The vignette of the blscrapeR package
• Katya Ognyanova's excellent PolNet tutorial
• Pablo Barbera's Star Wars data

Links to resources for learning R in more depth, roughly ordered from brief & accessible to longer & more advanced:

• Introducing R to a non-programmer in one hour by Alyssa Frazee, with a focus on statistics
• R workshop for data science by Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel, one of the authors of OpenIntro Statistics
• Online course offered by Datacamp (free version)
• Data basics tutorial from the makers of RStudio (online tutorial with online exercises, based on the book R for Data Science
• Digital History Methods in R by Lincoln Mullen (book draft with complete code, very instructive and detailed)
• Text Mining with R: A Tidy Approach by Julia Silge & David Robinson (open access book with deep coverage of using R for text mining and analysis)

Books that are both accessible and cover a wide range of tools available in R:

• Kosuke Imai, Quantitative Social Science: An Introduction
• John Maindonald and W. John Braun, Data Analysis and Graphics Using R: An Example-Based Approach
• Christopher Gandrud, Reproducible Research with R and RStudio