The What and Why of LING 343

Lisa Levinson

Why Data?

There’s always some kind of data!

Data (Allison Horst)

Why R?

Awesome Community

Welcoming R Community (Allison Horst)

• inclusive
• no gate-keeping
• beginner-friendly
• welcoming

Designed for non-programmers

• full (Turing complete) programming language
• BUT, targeted towards researchers, statistics, and data analysis
• emphasis on literate programming and readable code

Reproducibility

• R is oriented towards being able to repeat and reproduce analyses
• saves time/effort and supports open science!
• supported by RMarkdown and Quarto publishing

Class Focus

Computing, Data Analysis, and Visualization

• computing and basic programming fundamentals
• descriptive data analysis
• data visualization
• data collection design
• results reporting

What this class is not about

• inferential statistics (extending beyond the sample)
• machine learning
• computational linguistics (in a general sense)

Why linguistics?

• linguists work with many kinds of data
  • texts, corpora
  • experimental data
  • survey data
  • sociophonetic acoustic data
  • much more!
• course created for linguists, but open to others
• focus on language-related data, but not exclusively

More About Us

A brief version of my history with data

• teaching materials database for a chemistry professor (undergrad)
• payroll database for an IT department
• database-driven websites with mySQL backend
• survey and experiment data analysis/statistics
• analysis of language model and other lexical data
• teaching-related data

iClicker Setup

Join URL: https://join.iclicker.com/GGDH

Programming background

Have you done any programming before (not including html or css scripting)?

1. yes
   
2. no

Data Visualization

Have you created data visualizations/graphs in any software before?

1. yes
   
2. no

What’s your major?

type it in…

OK, logistical stuff!

Let’s go through the administrative stuff

If there’s time we’ll start setting up R!