Digital Research Toolkit
This seminar provides a gentle, hands-on introduction to the essential tools for quantitative research for students of linguistics and the humanities overall. During the course of the seminar, the students will familiarize themselves with software that is rarely taught but is invaluable in developing an efficient, transparent, reusable, and scalable research workflow (e.g. R basics, LaTeX, git). From text file, through data visualization, to creating beautiful reports: this course will empower students to improve their skill and help them establish good practices.
The course is targeted at students with little to no experience with programming. It provides key skills that are useful for research and industry jobs. Every week includes slides and homework assignments.
There are three versions of this course. The topics are mostly the same, but some topics are new in 2025 and some were omitted.
Course content
In this course, you'll learn how to make sense of data, communicate your insights clearly, and collaborate with others by sharing your data efficiently. It teaches the following concepts:
📂 directories and file hierarchy,
💻 R programming basics and RStudio IDE,
📦 installing and loading packages,
📄 working with scripts,
💡 data (types, sources and making sense of it),
⚙ preprocessing,
✅ logic,
🛠 data manipulation,
🌟 best practices,
📊 data visualization,
🌍 accessibility and WCOG,
📝 documentation,
🔢 LaTeX,
📖 scientific documents 101,
🔍 literature research,
⌨️ command line basics,
🖊️ text editors and their uses,
🔗 Git, GitHub, and SSH,
🤖 LLMs,
... and more!
The course does not cover topics such as:
❌ Experiment design
❌ Inferential statistics
❌ Cognitive modelling
❌ Corpus research