This is Part 1 of a two part series. Stay tuned for Part 2, which will cover numpy, pandas and scikit-learn.
R is an extremely powerful language for data analysis, and probably the best language for working with tabular data, running regressions, and making visualizations.
As political scientists, we are often interested in using text to understand the actions of political actors. Thankfully, have a growing set of tools for identifying political actors in text, including named entity recognition and dependency parses, custom event models, or hand labeling events text.