Help is on the Way
The following are tutorials on the basics of data collection, structuring, and data analysis, recorded at the DigiLab.
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
Instructor: Joey Stanley
Handout
Use this handout to follow along with Joey’s Excel videos
Data
*These datasets came from the Linguistics Atlas of the Gulf Seas and Cowlitz Country.
Instructor: Keith Knop
Handout
- Use this handout to learn about Open Refine.
Data
*OpenRefine is a free, and 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.
Instructor: Joey Stanley
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.
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 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
Big Data: Text Mining
Instructor: Kyle Vanderniet PhD candidate in Linguistics
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.
Let us know if you need additional help or would like to see a different kind of tutorial in the future.