corporaexplorer

corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections - Published in JOSS (2019)

https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer

Keywords

Repository

An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections

README.Rmd

---
output:
    github_document
---



```{r setup, include = FALSE}
knitr::opts_chunk$set(
  collapse = TRUE,
  comment = "#>",
  fig.path = "man/figures/README-",
  out.width = "100%"
)
```
# corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections


[![CRAN status](https://www.r-pkg.org/badges/version/corporaexplorer)](https://cran.r-project.org/package=corporaexplorer)
[![License: GPL v3](https://img.shields.io/badge/License-GPLv3-blue.svg)](https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0)
[![R build
status](https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer/actions/workflows/check-standard.yaml/badge.svg)](https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer/actions)
[![DOI](http://joss.theoj.org/papers/10.21105/joss.01342/status.svg)](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01342)
[![Mentioned in Awesome R](https://awesome.re/mentioned-badge.svg)](https://github.com/qinwf/awesome-R)



> **"I really like the application and its simplicity. It looks great and is very functional. ... a nice addition to text analysis tools."**  
> *--[Kenneth Benoit](https://github.com/kbenoit), creator of [quanteda](https://quanteda.io/), professor of computational social science at [LSE](https://www.lse.ac.uk/Methodology/People/Academic-Staff/Kenneth-Benoit/Kenneth-Benoit)*

> **"I really enjoyed interacting with corporaexplorer.**
> **This is exciting work that opens up doors for non-technical users."**   
> *--[Tyler Rinker](https://github.com/trinker), creator of [sentimentr](https://github.com/trinker/sentimentr) and [qdap](https://github.com/trinker/qdap)*



– Featured in RStudio’s “R Views” blog’s "Top 40 New R Packages”



– Included in CRAN Task View: Natural Language Processing






```{r, out.width = "100%", echo = FALSE}
knitr::include_graphics("https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer/raw/master/man/figures/readme_illustration.png")
```

*^Illustration^ ^screenshots^*


## What is corporaexplorer?

**corporaexplorer** is an R package that uses the `Shiny` graphical user interface framework for dynamic exploration of text collections.

**corporaexplorer** is designed for use with a wide range of text collections; one example could be a collection of tens of thousands of documents scraped from a governmental website; another example could be the collected works of a novelist; a third example could be the chapters of a single book.

**corporaexplorer**'s intended primary audience are qualitatively oriented researchers who
rely on close reading of textual documents as part of their academic activity,
but the package should also be a useful supplement for those doing quantitative textual research and wishing to visit the texts under study.
Finally, by offering a convenient way to explore any character vector, it can also be useful for a wide range of other R users.

While collecting and preparing the text collections to be explored requires some familiarity with R programming, using the Shiny apps for exploring and extracting documents from the corpus should be fairly intuitive also for those with no programming knowledge, once the apps have been set up by a collaborator. Thus, the aim is for the package to be useful for anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of R -- or with collaborators who have such knowledge.


## Installation

To install the released version from CRAN,
simply run the following from an R console:

``` r
install.packages("corporaexplorer")
```

Alternatively,
to install the development version from GitHub,
run the following from an R console:

``` r
install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("kgjerde/corporaexplorer")
```

**corporaexplorer** works on Mac OS, Windows and Linux.
(The Shiny apps look much clunkier on Windows than on the other platforms,
but the apps are fully functional.)


## How to cite

Please cite the following paper if you use **corporaexplorer** in your research.

> Gjerde, Kristian Lundby. 2019. "corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections." _Journal of Open Source Software_ 4 (38): 1342. [https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01342](https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.01342).

For a BibTeX entry, use the output from `citation(package = "corporaexplorer")`.


## Usage

For usage instructions and example corpora,
see the [package web page](https://kgjerde.github.io/corporaexplorer/).


## Demo apps

The package includes two demo apps.

To explore Jane Austen's novels
(data accessed through the
[**janeaustenr**](https://github.com/juliasilge/janeaustenr) package):

``` r
library(corporaexplorer)
run_janeausten_app()
```

To explore the US presidents' State of the Union addresses
(data accessed through the the
[**sotu**](https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=sotu) package):

``` r
library(corporaexplorer)
run_sotu_app()
```

For more info, see
https://kgjerde.github.io/corporaexplorer/articles/jane_austen.html and
https://kgjerde.github.io/corporaexplorer/articles/sotu.html,
and also the [function references](https://kgjerde.github.io/corporaexplorer/reference/index.html).

## A note on platforms and encoding

**corporaexplorer** works on Mac OS, Windows and Linux,
and there are some important differences in how R handles text
on the different platforms.
If you are working with plain English text,
there will most likely be no issues with encoding on any platform.
Unfortunately, working with
non-[ASCII](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII) encoded text in R
(e.g. non-English characters), *can* be complicated -- in particular on Windows. 

**On Mac OS or Linux**, problems with encoding will likely not arise at all.
If problems do arise, they can typically be solved by
making the R "locale" unicode-friendly (e.g. `Sys.setlocale("LC_ALL", "en_US.UTF-8")`).
NB! This assumes that the text is UTF-8 encoded,
so if changing the locale in this way does not help,
make sure that the text is encoded as UTF-8 characters.
Alternatively, if you can ascertain the character encoding, set the locale correspondingly.

**On Windows**, things can be much more complicated.
The most important thing is to check carefully that
the texts appear as expected in `corporaexplorer`'s apps,
and that the searches function as expected.
If there are problems, a good place to start is a
blog post with the telling title
["Escaping from character encoding hell in R on Windows"](https://www.r-bloggers.com/2016/06/escaping-from-character-encoding-hell-in-r-on-windows/).

For (a lot) more information about encoding, see
[this informative article](https://kunststube.net/encoding/)
by David C. Zentgraf.


## Contributing

Contributions in the form of feedback, bug reports and code are most welcome. Ways to contribute:

*  Contact [me](mailto:klg@nupi.no) by email.
*  Issues and bug reports: [File a GitHub issue](https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer/issues).
*  Fork the source code, modify, and issue a [pull request](https://docs.github.com/articles/creating-a-pull-request-from-a-fork/) through the [project GitHub page](https://github.com/kgjerde/corporaexplorer).

Owner

JOSS Publication

corporaexplorer: An R package for dynamic exploration of text collections

Published

June 13, 2019

DOI

10.21105/joss.01342

Volume 4, Issue 38, Page 1342

Authors

Kristian Lundby Gjerde
Research Fellow, Norwegian Institute of International Affairs (NUPI)

Editor

Leonardo Uieda

Tags

qualitative research mixed methods text analysis corpora Shiny

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