Summer School
The Chair of English and Digital Linguistics at Chemnitz University of Technology proudly presents
Visualization of Linguistic Data with R
(July 23–24, 2025)
NEWS FOR REGISTERED PARTICIPANTS
Registration is now closed. All registered participants have been informed by email about the individual modalities of their own participation.
If you have not heard from us yet, please check your spam folder.
Depending on how fast you registered, you will be able to attend:
- on-site at Altes Heizhaus, Straße der Nationen 62, Chemnitz, Germany,
- online in BigBlueButton, with some limited opportunities to interact, or
- via streaming on YouTube.
All participants will get access to the shared material.
Please note that we are only able to provide on-site participants with certificates of attendance. If you are attending online, we cannot confirm your attendance.
General information
Join us for a two-day hybrid summer school with Prof. Antony Unwin, co-editor of the Handbook of Data Visualization (Springer 2008) and author of Graphical Data Analysis with R (Routledge 2015) and Getting (more out of) Graphics: Practice and Principles of Data Visualisation (Routledge 2024).
In this summer school, you will learn what graphics are best suited for the visualisation of particular types of linguistic data and how to produce such graphics yourself using the free software R. Please see the detailed programme below.
Some knowledge of R may be an advantage for participation in the summer school – but this is by no means a requirement, as the workshop will start with an introductory session for participants with no prior experience.
The summer school will be held in hybrid format with both on-site and online participation options.
Thanks to financial support by the Lernbrücke Chemnitz-Lviv (a DAAD project funded by the Harald-Christ-Stiftung für Demokratie und Vielfalt), participation is free of charge.
Programme
Please note: All times are Central European Summer Time (CEST)
Wednesday, July 23, 2025
| Time (CEST) | Event |
|---|---|
| 09:00–10:00 | Registration |
| 10:00–10:15 | Welcome and housekeeping (Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer & Cansu Akan) |
| 10:15–10:30 | Brief introduction to graphics in linguistics (Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer & Cansu Akan) |
|
10:30–12:45 (incl. 15-min. coffee break at about 11:30) |
Foundations of R: Introduction to R, RStudio, and the R ecosystem (Antony Unwin & Sasha Coelho)
|
| 12:45–14:15 | Lunch break in the Mensa Straße der Nationen (self-paying except for guests; food served until 13:30 only) |
| 14:15–15:15 | What is for what? – Interpreting barcharts, histograms, scatterplots… (Antony Unwin) |
| 15:15–15:45 | Coffee break |
| 15:45–16:45 | Show and tell: Discussing the linguistic graphics participants have brought (Antony Unwin) |
| 16:45–17:00 | Closing for the day (Antony Unwin & Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer) |
Thursday, July 24, 2025
| Time (CEST) | Event |
|---|---|
| 09:00– 09:15 | Opening session (Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer & Sasha Coelho) |
| 09:15–11:15 |
Modern R (the tidyverse and ggplot2): Preparing data and drawing graphics (Antony Unwin & Sasha Coelho) Includes a 30-minute hands-on session for on-site participants at the end. |
| 11:15–11:30 | Coffee break |
| 11:30–12:30 | What can you see? – Exploration with graphics (Antony Unwin) |
|
12:30–14:00 |
Lunch break in the Mensa Straße der Nationen (self-paying except for guests; food served until 13:30 only) |
| 14:00–15:30 | Discussion session: Exploring and visualizing linguistic datasets (Antony Unwin) |
| 15:30–16:00 | Coffee break |
| 16:00–16:45 | Introduction to WordValue (Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Johannes Tochtermann & Mark Jacob) |
| 16:45–17:15 | Sharing other data visualization tools for linguistics & Workshop closing (Antony Unwin & Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer) |
What to prepare in advance
Please bring your own laptop if possible (or let us know if you cannot).
We will be working with R, a widely used free open-source programming language and environment designed for statistical computing and data visualization. R offers linguists several packages like tidyverse, ggplot2, and dplyr, which support the analysis of numerical data and large text corpora as well as the creation of visualizations.
Please download and install the software on your computer before the summer school, so that you can join the hands-on session in the beginning right away. In order to get started with R, you need to download and install the software in two steps:
1. Download and install R from: https://cloud.r-project.org/
2. Download and install R Studio from: https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/
During the summer school, we will also discuss the advantages and disadvantages of existing linguistic visualisations with R – so please have some linguistic graphics from your own research or from other publications at hand to share with everyone for our discussion.
To produce our own graphics with R, we will draw on freely available linguistic datasets – so if you know of any interesting freely available datasets (either your own or from published researched by others), we would be very happy if you could share these with us, ideally with a brief description of the content.
On the second day of the summer school, you will also get a brief introduction to the software WordValue, which we developed at Chemnitz University of Technology/LMU Munich to visualize information using colour-coding in text. This will be followed by a session in which we would be very happy for everyone to share other useful software for the visualization of linguistic data – so please have some suggestions and links ready to share online.
Contact
If you have any questions about the summer school, please write to edl@phil.tu-chemnitz.de.
Summer school team
Antony Unwin, Christina Sanchez-Stockhammer, Sasha Coelho, Cansu Akan, Isabell Nitschmann