Fiddling about with words

Over the last two years, I wrote an awful lot of words about the 23 Bond films that had been made up until the end of 2012. (We don't count the David Niven Casino Royale, or Never Say Never Again, because they were, well, shit.) Inspired by Jon Millward's Deep Inside, a statistical analysis of porn stars, I thought I'd do some data mining of my own. Unfortunately, I'm still not very familiar with R, that programmatic workbench beloved of statisticians, so to get my feet wet I thought I'd start by analysing and displaying the frequency of different words in what I wrote. And here's what you get:

Struggling with R

I used to have problems understanding large volumes of data. Then I installed R. Now I have more problems.

R, ah

Today I was back in the office, but it was very much denuded of people, which gave me a chance to buckle down and work on getting to grips with R.

R is a statistical workbench of a computer programme, a heinously complicated yet very capable set of tools for analysing data. It's designed more for a programmer who's good at stats than the other way round though: it laughs in the face of easy user interfaces and although there's a million and one things it can do, everything involves installing an extra library here or there.