“R” you experienced

It’s not everyday that the New York Times publishes an article about open-source statistical software. In today’s NYT, however, Ashlee Vance writes about R, the software environment used by researchers across numerous disciplines, including linguistics. Over the last several years, R has been lauded by a number of linguists as a comprehensive statistical package capable of handling complicated language-related data analyses. In fact, at least two books (and perhaps others) have been published recently that provide overviews for using R for language-related research. Prof. R. H. Baayen’s Analyzing Linguistic Data (2008, Cambridge University Press) and Prof. Keith Johnson’s Quantiative Methods in Linguistics (2008, Blackwell Publishing) are both excellent resources for linguistics students and researchers interested in quantitative methods in language research using R. Prof. Stefan Th. Gries at the University of California at Santa Barbara also has a book coming out soon concerning applications of R in corpus linguistics as well as a “Boot Camp” in August 2009 that will introduce participants to methods in quantitative corpus linguistics using R. As an R neophyte, this type of press is certainly encouraging.