R meetup Beirut
I have organized an R meetup at the American University of Beirut with a digital humanities focus. It is for total beginners. I am a user of the Stylo package for R. I have been learning more basic humanities data analysis with R after attending this summer’s National Humanities Center‘s Digital Textual Analysis seminar. Kamal Abou Mikhael graduate student in Language will be co-leading. If we believe the R Users Meetup site, it will be the first in Lebanon, and second to the group in Cairo in the Middle East.
See the notes, and code snippets from our meetup here.
Why a meetup? Because it is not a class. There is no credit. We will let it go the way that participants want and need. We encourage you to bring your own materials. There is absolutely no coding experience needed to start. It will advance at the speed of the participants.
Why might I want to learn text analysis in R? If you want to work with large amounts of digital text (corpora), live social data (Twitter, Flickr, etc), material taken from an API, you will want to learn a programming language. One of the standard languages for textual data analysis and the digital humanities is R. You might check the flow chart on this page to see if the idea is of interest to you.
Why R? R is open source, free, flexible and it comes with many libraries and packages.
What do I need? A computer, a download of R Studio, an e-copy of Jockers’ Text Analysis with R for Students of Literature (go to our e-book section at Jafet). If there is interest in the meetup continuing in the Spring we will begin the book Humanities Data in R.
How much does it cost? Just a smile, or two 
When? We are thinking on Tuesday at the end of the afternoon for two hours, every other week until Christmas.
Confirmed dates: 22 Sept, 13 Oct, 27 Oct, 10 Nov (cancelled), 24 Nov
Time: 4-6pm
Location: AUB, ACPS training room, Van Dyck Annex
Check out these information links:
More basic:
Jeff Rydberg-Cox’s Statistical Methods for Studying Literature in R
A Gentle Introduction to Text Mining Using R
Introduction to Basic Text Mining in R
More advanced:
Term Frequency and Word Clouds using the TM library
Rfacebook (not so clear, but you can see basically what can be done)
If you can recommend other links, send them on.