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Last updated on 2026-07-21 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

  • Which packages are needed?
  • How is the dataset loaded?
  • How is a dataset inspected?

Objectives

  • Knowledge of the relevant packages
  • Ability to to load the dataset
  • Ability to inspect the dataset

Getting started

When performing text analysis in R, the built-in functions in R are not sufficient. It is therefore necessary to install some additional packages. In this course we will be using the packages tidyverse, tidytext and tm.

R 

install.packages("tidyverse")
install.packages("tidytext")
install.packages("tm")

library(tidyverse)
library(tidytext)
library(tm)
Callout

Documentation for each package

If you would like to know more about the different packages, please click on the links below.

Getting data

Begin by downloading the dataset called articles.csv. Place the downloaded file in the data/ folder. You can do this directly from R by copying and pasting this into your console. (The console is the panel under your script).

R 

download.file("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/KUBDatalab/R-textmining_new/main/episodes/data/guardianArticles.csv", "data/guardianArticles.csv", mode = "wb")

After downloading the data, it needs to be loaded into R’s memory by means of the function read_csv().

R 

articles <- read_csv("data/guardianArticles.csv", na = c("NA", "NULL", ""))

Taking a first look at the dataset

R 

articles

OUTPUT 

# A tibble: 1,898 × 7
      id date    text                            section region author wordcount
   <dbl> <chr>   <chr>                           <chr>   <chr>  <chr>      <dbl>
 1     1 2026-05 Britain’s biometrics watchdogs… News    UK     Jessi…      1328
 2     2 2026-02 Iran’s architecture of interne… News    UK     Aisha…       657
 3     3 2026-01 TikTok will begin to roll out … News    UK     Mark …       623
 4     4 2026-05 The parent company of Donald T… News    US     Edwar…       348
 5     5 2026-05 It is a familiar story. Extrav… Opinion UK     Edito…       585
 6     6 2026-04 Sonia Bompastor, the Chelsea h… Sport   UK     Tom G…       468
 7     7 2026-03 Transcription ends with an epi… Arts    UK     Sukhd…       917
 8     8 2026-04 When Greg Swann was appointed … Sport   AUS    Jonat…       794
 9     9 2026-02 Immigration and Customs Enforc… News    US     Harry…       915
10    10 2026-01 Gathering Summer after summer,… News    UK     Rebec…      4213
# ℹ 1,888 more rows

Data description

The dataset contains newspaper articles from the Guardian newspaper. The harvested articles were published between June 2025 and May 2026 and contain the word “technology”.

The original dataset contained some variables considered irrelevant within the parameters of this course. The following variables were kept:

  • id - unique number identifying each article
  • date - month and publication year
  • text - full text from the article
  • section - Guardian news section
  • region - production region
  • author - name(s) of journalist(s)
  • wordcount - number of words
Discussion

Taking a quick look at the data

The tidyverse-package has some functions that allow you to inspect the dataset. Below, you can see some of these functions and what they do.

R 

head(articles)

OUTPUT 

# A tibble: 6 × 7
     id date    text                             section region author wordcount
  <dbl> <chr>   <chr>                            <chr>   <chr>  <chr>      <dbl>
1     1 2026-05 Britain’s biometrics watchdogs … News    UK     Jessi…      1328
2     2 2026-02 Iran’s architecture of internet… News    UK     Aisha…       657
3     3 2026-01 TikTok will begin to roll out n… News    UK     Mark …       623
4     4 2026-05 The parent company of Donald Tr… News    US     Edwar…       348
5     5 2026-05 It is a familiar story. Extrava… Opinion UK     Edito…       585
6     6 2026-04 Sonia Bompastor, the Chelsea he… Sport   UK     Tom G…       468

R 

tail(articles)

OUTPUT 

# A tibble: 6 × 7
     id date    text                             section region author wordcount
  <dbl> <chr>   <chr>                            <chr>   <chr>  <chr>      <dbl>
1  4970 2025-07 "[Where’s the game at?] Definit… Sport   UK     James…      8817
2  4975 2025-06 "Tim Henman, who was disqualifi… Sport   UK     Katy …      7537
3  4981 2025-06 "Ali Martin’s report will be wi… Sport   UK     Rob S…      8874
4  4994 2025-06 "An epic tie-break to end an ep… Sport   UK     John …      9208
5  5003 2025-11 "Don’t you just love Christmas … Lifest… UK     Hanna…     13325
6  5018 2025-07 "Here’s Ewan Murray’s report an… Sport   UK     David…     14350

R 

glimpse(articles)

OUTPUT 

Rows: 1,898
Columns: 7
$ id        <dbl> 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 1…
$ date      <chr> "2026-05", "2026-02", "2026-01", "2026-05", "2026-05", "2026…
$ text      <chr> "Britain’s biometrics watchdogs have warned that national ov…
$ section   <chr> "News", "News", "News", "News", "Opinion", "Sport", "Arts", …
$ region    <chr> "UK", "UK", "UK", "US", "UK", "UK", "UK", "AUS", "US", "UK",…
$ author    <chr> "Jessica Murray and Robert Booth", "Aisha Down", "Mark Swene…
$ wordcount <dbl> 1328, 657, 623, 348, 585, 468, 917, 794, 915, 4213, 1304, 66…

R 

names(articles)

OUTPUT 

[1] "id"        "date"      "text"      "section"   "region"    "author"
[7] "wordcount"

R 

dim(articles)

OUTPUT 

[1] 1898    7
Key Points
  • Packages must be installed and loaded
  • The dataset needs to be loaded
  • The dataset can be inspected by means of different functions