5 First steps
Vladimir Buskin 
5.1 Why learn R to begin with?
When it comes to data analysis, learning R offers an overwhelming number of short- and long-term advantages over conventional spreadsheet software such as Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc:
First of all, it’s completely free. There’s no need to obtain any expensive licenses, as it is the case for commercial software such as SPSS or MS Excel.
R makes it very easy to document and share every step of the analysis, thereby facilitating reproducible workflows.
Large (and by that I mean extremely large!) datasets pose no problems whatsoever. Loading tabular data with hundreds of thousands (or even millions) of rows only takes a few seconds, whereas most other software would crash.
There are numerous extensions that provide tailored functions for corpus linguistics that aren’t available in general-purpose spreadsheet software. This allows us to work with corpora, use complex search expression, perform part-of-speech annotation, dependency parsing, and much more – all from within R.
R’s
ggplot2offers an incredibly powerful framework for data visualisation. Don’t believe it? Check out the ggplot2 gallery.The CRAN repository features more than 20,000 packages that can be installed to expand the functionality of R almost indefinitely. Should none of them meet your needs, R gives you the tools to comfortably write and share your own functions and packages.
5.2 Installing R
The first step involves downloading the R programming language itself. The link will take you to the homepage of the Comprehensive R Archive Network (CRAN) where you can download the binary distribution. Choose the one that corresponds to your operating system (Windows/MAC/Linux).
Click “Download R for Windows” \(\rightarrow\) Select “base” \(\rightarrow\) Click on “Download R-4.4.1 for Windows” (or whatever most recent version is currently displayed).
Open the set-up file you’ve just downloaded and simply follow the instructions on screen. It’s fine to go with the default options.
Click “Download R for macOS” \(\rightarrow\) Select the latest release for your OS
Open the downloaded .pkg file and follow the instructions in the installation window.
5.3 Installing RStudio
You can now download and install RStudio. RStudio is a so-called “Integrated Development Environment” (IDE), which will provide us with a variety of helpful tools to write and edit code comfortably. If R was a musical instrument, then RStudio would be the recording studio, so-to-speak.