Your fieldbook for this lab should include some of the code you found most interesting/enlightening/infuriating. You can copy and paste from the RMD files we used in class. Make sure you code blocks are separated from your text. They should look like this, but with code in between:
You should try to tweak some of the code blocks to do new things: study works by another author in Project Gutenberg, for instance, experiment with different length ngrams, or adjust something else that strikes your fancy.
You can’t break anything. If something goes wrong simply clear the environment (using that broom icon in the Environment pane) and start again. If something goes really wrong, I could just send you the original text again. I am always available to help.
Remember that when you run this code you’re not making permanent changes to the actual data on the websites from which you imported it: you’re bringing the data into the R environment where you can experiment and yes, even make mistakes. In your fieldbook, I want you to ruminate on code as text, and think about digital text in the same medium-specific ways we have considered historial media in this class. How does the medium of a programming language (and the specific programming environment of RStudio + RMD files) shape what we can (and can’t) know about digitize text? When we work with text as data, as we’ve begun to do here, what is gained and what is lost?