1.2 How this book works

From here on, this book will work as follows. In 2 we will look at R and how to get it working on our system. Our choice of R here is based on the fact that it is both open and free, as well as being the current choice of software for most social scientists (and therefore the one you are most likely to be working with). R also has a wide range of packages that we can use for text analysis. Then in @ref(#importing-data), we will focus on the actual texts we are going to use and how to get them into R. This will cover converting PDF files to TXT, reading CSV files, and downloading files from an on-line database. Then in 5, we will cover the outstanding issues of reliability and validity, and how to ensure that the codes you get from (a more classical) text analysis are reliable enough to use later. Then, in @ref(#preliminaries), we look at what is in our data and how we can best describe the texts we are dealing with. Finally, the last four chapters cover the four main types of techniques we can use to find out more about our text or measure things about it: 7, 9, 10 and 11. We conclude, of course, with a list of references that we have used and that you can use if you are interested in learning more.