In agoldst/litdata: R resources for Literary Data, Spring 2015

# ignore this fiddly bit
knitr::opts_chunk$set(comment=NA)

The file system

1. Where do you start when you open RStudio?

YOUR ANSWER HERE

1. What happens if you use setwd() but specify a path to something that doesn't exist?

YOUR ANSWER HERE

1. What does setwd("..") do? Are there any circumstances where this command fails? Try a few paths with .. as one of the folders (not just on its own). What is ..? What is ../..? How about .?

YOUR ANS....oh you know what to do.

1. Change working directories to TextAnalysisWithR (wherever you unzipped it). Inside this unzipped set of folders, there is a folder called plainText. With TextAnalysisWithR as your working directory, how do you change to this directory with:

   (a) one use of setwd? (b) two successive uses of setwd? (c) a single use of setwd but with a different path specification?

To check your results, use getwd() and see if it returns a path ending in plainText.

Because it is tricky to match file systems, type your answers in the following code block, which is not evaluated by R:

# one use of setwd

# two uses of setwd


# one use of setwd, redux

Assignment

1. Consider:

x <- 10
print(x * 2)
x <- 2 * x
print(x)

Why doesn't the last line print 10?

1. Computers are famed for their rigidity. Tell them to follow a set of instructions over and over again, and they will do the same exact thing over and over again. Write two lines that do not produce the same result when you enter them into the console repeatedly. Use x.

# enter your R code, repeated several times, here
# enter your R code, repeated several times, here

Speculate: Is the same thing possible without using x?

1. Explain the difference between the following statements (try them both):

five <- 2 + 2
5 <- 2 + 2

Types

Write down variable names and types needed to store the following information. Remember that R variables are always vectors. Note when a multiple-element vector will be needed; just make up fake data.

For example: to store the information about whether the most recent winner of the Booker Prize is a U.K. citizen, one needs a single-element logical vector, so note this as follows:

last_booker_uk <- F # logical

On the other hand, to store the information about whether each of the Booker winners were from what Paul Gilroy calls "Brit-town," we would need a multiple vector:

booker_uk <- c(T, T, F) # and so on. logical: one element for each year

1. the titles of all the novels written by Georgette Heyer

2. the complete text of Moby-Dick (how many elements?)

3. the complete text of Moby-Dick, with formatting information

4. the gender of all the Nobel laureates in literature

5. the number of copies of Beloved held in each library in New Jersey

6. the total sales of The Lord of the Rings in each year since publication

7. the dates of publication of each serial installment of Great Expectations

8. the titles of Shakespeare's plays and their genres in the First Folio

9. the names of 8 modernist poets and the number of times each one appeared in the same issue of Poetry as each of the others

10. bonus: the image currently appearing on your monitor

agoldst/litdata documentation built on May 10, 2019, 7:34 a.m.