R software for students in the M.A. political science
R is a free programming language and software environment for statistical computing and graphics supported by the R Foundation for Statistical Computing. The free software is widely used in the social sciences for developing statistical software and data analysis.
For students in the M.A. Political Science who have no experience with R so far, the department regularly offered an introductory workshop. The 2-days R workshop enabled students to master the basics of R (in RStudio). This is a ‘hands-on’ course where participants are given generalizable bits of R-code to work on and are expected to actively participate. In addition, it intends to prepare prospective students of the course “Introduction to Quantitative Analysis”. In the department’s substantive courses, R is used – inter alia – in the classes on quantitative text analysis of Prof. Sven-Oliver Proksch, who is one of the developers of wordfish, a computer program written in R to extract political positions from text documents.
Soon the workshop will be offered as a self-learning module as part of the Introduction to Quantitative Methods in October. Until then, we also recommend interested students to check out the following resources that could help them start with R and R-studio on their own.
- R for Social Scientists: https://datacarpentry.org/r-socialsci/
- Quantitative Politics with R: http://qpolr.com/index.html
- RStudio Education: https://education.rstudio.com/learn/beginner/
Past R workshops at the CCCP:
4th-5th October 2018 – Flavio Azevedo
25th-26th February 2019 – Flavio Azevedo
2nd and 4th October 2019 – Jeren R.
2nd-3rd April 2020 - Jeren R.
24th-26th Ocotober 2020 - Daniel Saldivia Gonzatti