Tutorials
Help is on the Way
The following are tutorials on the basics of data collection, structuring, and data analysis, recorded at the DigiLab. (For links to resources used here, as well as many others, visit our Resources page!)
Data Visualization Tutorials
Instructor: Kyle Vanderniet
Handout
- Use this handout to follow along with Kyle’s Excel videos.
Sample Data
- Use this data to work alongside Kyle.
Videos
Kyle starts this series off by explaining the very basics and how to navigate through Excel. He goes over how to insert, copy, paste, drag, fill your data. Most people will know how to do this, but it is important to assure that everyone is on the same page before continuing throughout this website.
Kyle covers some more advanced topics on how to control the layout and structure of your data. Alignment, merge, filter, sorting, fill, color, and size are some of what Kyle dives into. He makes sure that the viewer has a good understanding of the different menus and the data tab in Excel to give the user more control over their workbooks.
Kyle uses this subject of conditional formatting to introduce the viewers to the logic of formulas that are discussed, specifically in the following video. He covers some of the most commonly used formulas (IF, SUM. COUNT, TRIM, VLOOKUP, CONCATENATE, DAYS, NOW, TODAY, ROUND, ETC). Also, Kyle breaks these down so learning how to nest certain functions makes more sense.
Functions and Nested Functions
Kyle introduces more functions and how to nest them inside another. This is one of Excel’s most powerful abilities and Kyle wants to help you grasp the concept. This ability is good for not only academia, but also the job market.
Excel’s most powerful feature are pivot tables. Kyle introduces them and teaches the viewer how to manage them. This feature allows the user to view and pull data in a new way. This topic is advanced, but well worth knowing if you are working with a lot of different data in Excel.
Google Sheets
- Watch this video for help with Google Sheets
This user-friendly guide book created by Joey Stanley covers a wide range of topics, including: (1) different versions of Excel; (2) the absolute basics; (3) useful techniques like search & replace and sorting & filtering; (4) the awesome power of pivot tables; (5) getting started with functions; (6) lookup tables; (7) visualizations and how to make some simple graphs and charts; and (8) some miscellaneous little tips and tricks.
Data
Use the sample datasets below to follow along.
Instructor: Keith Knop
Handout
- Use this handout to learn about OpenRefine.
Data
*OpenRefine is a free, open-source tool similar to Excel as in it can house your data along with cleaning, transforming, and extending it with web services. Keith goes through how to navigate, add, and clean existing data.
Basic and Advanced R Series
Introduction to R
Learn R’s syntax, how to make variables, and basic functions. Learn to import multiple file types to be able to filter and extract portions of your data. Lastly where to go for help, both in R and on the internet. If you need assistance on downloading R and RStudio, here is Joey’s Handout.
Visualizations I: Introduction to ggplot2
This will cover some of the basics of visualization including the following topics: (1) general concepts relating to data visualization, software, and data types; (2) download and installation; (3) plotting two continuous variables as a scatterplot; (4) plotting one variable as a bar plot or a histogram; (5) plotting one continuous variable and one categorical variable as a boxplot or a violin plot; and (6) where to go for help with ggplot2.
Visualizations II: Customizing Plots in ggplot2
We unfortunately do not have a recording for part 2 of ggplot2. If you are interested in some intermediate content regarding ggplot2, This handout will cover additional topics in ggplot2 that let you customize plot in various ways: (1) adding and changing titles and axis labels; (2) custom colors; (3) renaming and reordering things; (4) legends; (5) faceting; (6) themes; and a custom section on saving plots.
Building Interactive Webpages in R: Introduction to Shiny Part 1
This video covers some of the basics of the Shiny package built in R. We unfortunately did not get the second part recorded but everything for both parts can be found online. Since Shiny is used for web applications and can be dynamic, Joey decided to make this tutorial a web page so you can see shiny in action.
Communicating to Your Audience with R Markdown
This will cover these introductory topics: (1) an introduction to the tool and why it might be handy; (2) the “narrative” or the non-code portion of the document and how to format it; (3) inserting code and how to modify code block; and (4) output formats and ways to modify how the final document looks.
Clean and Tidy Data: Tidyverse Part 1
This is the seventh installment of the R workshop series in Spring 2018, and the first of two workshops that introduces the tidyverse suite of packages. This document will cover introductory topics in dplyr, tidyr, forcats, stringr, readr, and readxl that let you clean and tidy your data in various ways: (1) an introduction to the suite of packages; (2) getting data into R from various formats and saving data to your computer; (3) reordering and removing
columns using select, with a tangent into the “pipe” (%>%); (4) creating new columns and modifying existing ones with mutate; and (5) miscellaneous functions like filter for subsetting and rename for renaming columns.
Reshaping and Transforming Your Data: Tidyverse Part 2
This is the ninth installment of the R workshop series in Spring 2018 and the second workshop that introduces functions from the “tidyverse.” This document will cover these introductory topics: (1) loading the familiarizing yourself with the data used in this workshop; (2) various ways of merging datasets together; (3) summarizing your data by group; and (4) reshaping your data from tall to wide and vice versa.
Text Analysis in R
Instructor: Katie Kuiper, PhD Candidate in Linguistics
For information about how to conduct text analysis in R, see Katie’s two series in Text Analysis Tutorials below.
R and ggplot2 (Fall 2021 Data Visualization series)
Introduction to R
Instructor: Katie Kuiper, PhD Candidate in Linguistics
- Video coming soon
- Handout coming soon
This workshop introduces the statistical software R and how it can be used for data visualization.
Introduction to ggplot2
Instructor: Katie Kuiper, PhD Candidate in Linguistics
This installment of the data visualization series introduces the R graphing package ggplot2, explaining its basic components and how a variety of common graphs can be built from those elements.
Advanced ggplot2
Instructor: Keiko Bridwell, PhD Student in Linguistics
This follow-up workshop on ggplot2 explains some ways that the basic ggplot2 syntax can be modified to give you greater control over the appearance of your graph. It includes (1) a deeper explanation of how to use the parameters in geom_bar(), (2) how to facet plots, (3) using jitter in scatterplots, (4) adding regression lines with geom_smooth(), (5) modifying theme(), and (6) using color palettes.
Spring 2021 Data Visualization Series
Make sure you have Tableau Public and RStudio installed and refer to our tutorials for installing and getting started if you need help.
Intro to data visualization resources at UGA and beyond
Bar graphs and histograms in Excel, Tableau, and R
*Download here is in xls format, save it as csv for use with Tableau and R. Dataset from Kaggle.
Scatterplots in Excel, Tableau, and R
*Downloads are in xls format, save it as csv for use with Tableau and R
Area Graphs in Excel, Tableau, and R
*Downloads are in xls format, save it as csv for use with Tableau and R
Spring into Research 2021 Presentation
Instructor: Katie Kuiper and Keiko Bridwell, PhD candidates in Linguistics
This presentation gives an overview of Excel, Tableau, and R; guidelines for approaching data visualization, and links to many websites and books that provide more information about ways to present data! This presentation was given as part of Spring into Research 2021, Fall into Research 2021, and the Graduate Student Success series in Fall 2021.
Fall 2021 Data Visualization Series
- Introduction to R (Katie Kuiper) – see R Tutorials
- Introduction to ggplot2 (Katie Kuiper) – see R Tutorials
- Advanced ggplot2 (Keiko Bridwell) – see R Tutorials
- Network analysis (Keiko Bridwell) – see Network Analysis
- Mapping geographical data (Meagan Duever, Katie Kuiper, Keiko Bridwell) – coming soon
Here you can find information about how to organize your data and begin plotting it in Excel and R, as well as online options for creating graphs.
For written instructions on how to use Tableau Public, click the link above.
Working with data that explores the connections between individuals? The tutorial at the link above explains the basics of network analysis, how to prepare your data to visualize it as a network, and how to use the Cytoscape software to create those images.
Fall 2021 Data Visualization series
Network Analysis workshop
Instructor: Keiko Bridwell, PhD Student in Linguistics
This tutorial provides an overview of what network analysis is, how to structure data to create network graphs, and some of the free resources available for generating network graphs. It ends with a step-by-step walk-through of how to create and customize a graph using Gephi, a free piece of network analysis software.
Text Analysis Tutorials
Text Corpora That You Can Use
Instructor: John Hale, Arch Professor of Linguistics
A growing collection of natural language corpora is now available to the UGA community. This colloquium offers a live demonstration of the search tool cqp, showing how corpora that are available right now may be used to address questions about how people use language, what words mean, and how authors achieve their literary ends. For access to the corpus server, email linglab@uga.edu.
Instructor: Kyle Vanderniet, PhD candidate in Linguistics
Big Data: Text Mining
This tutorial offers an introduction to the Kucera server and a variety of corpora. Participants will explore these corpora to find new ideas about language use and about using big data in humanities research.
Advanced Text Mining
This session quickly reviews text queries in both CQP and Bash shell then sure how to sort, count, save, extract your date so that you can manipulate it with the program of your choice.
Text Analysis Series 1
Instructor: Katie Kuiper, PhD Candidate in Linguistics
To follow along with Katie, download the sample data below, as well as the code provided under each workshop. R Studio is free and available for download here.
Data
- “A Modest Proposal” sample text
Text Analysis Workshop: Text Analysis Resources
Text Analysis Workshop: Jupyter Notebooks and Python
Text Analysis Workshop: R for Text Analysis
Text Analysis Workshop: Advanced R for text Analysis
Text Analysis Series 2
Instructor: Katie Kuiper, PhD Candidate in Linguistics
Text Analysis 101: Text Analysis Basics
Text Analysis 101: Text Analysis for Literature and Beyond
Text Analysis 101: Creating your own Social Media Corpus
Text Analysis 101: Analyzing Social Media
Text Analysis Methods and Tools
If you’re interested in looking at patterns within a text, this tutorial provides an introduction to Voyant Tools and topic modeling.
Mapping Tutorials
To learn how to set up and format your data for mapping, check out Meagan Duever’s step-by-step tutorials on how to use the QGIS app. Additional GIS tools and references are also provided!
Need to visualize geographic data? Here you can find a list of tools for mapping and spatial analysis, including story maps, interactive web mapping programs, and desktop programs.
Templates
Make writing your thesis or dissertation easier with our LaTeX template which is approved for use by UGA’s graduate school.
New to LaTeX? See our series of workshops
Introduction to LaTeX
How to best use LaTeX and learn its syntax and logic.
Video recording
The UGA LaTeX Template
How to apply the UGA LaTeX template to your thesis or dissertation.
Video recording
Template and additional materials
Advanced Topics in LaTeX
Customize and use LaTeX for your own discipline.
Video Recording
Outside Resources
Curated by Alan Liu, the DH Toychest offers a list of DH tools, sample datasets for practice, tutorials, and a wealth of other information and resources.
Let us know if you need additional help or would like to see a different kind of tutorial in the future.