litRiddle: R package for exploring literary quality

Authors: Maciej Eder, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Joris van Zundert, Saskia Lensink License: GPL-3

This is an R package being a part of the Riddle of Literary Quality project.

The package contains the data of a reader survey about fiction in Dutch, a description of the novels the readers rated, and the results of stylistic measurements of the novels. The package also contains functions to combine, analyze, and visualize these data.

See: https://literaryquality.huygens.knaw.nl/ for further details. Information in Dutch about the package can be found at https://karinavdo.github.io/RaadselLiteratuur/02_07_data_en_R_package.html.

If you use litRiddle in your academic publications, please consider citing the following references:

Maciej Eder, Lensink, S., Van Zundert, J.J., and Van Dalen-Oskam, K.H. (2022). “Replicating The Riddle of Literary Quality: The LitRiddle Package for R.” In Digital Humanities 2022 Conference Abstracts, 636–637. Tokyo: The University of Tokyo / DH2022 Local Organizing Committee. https://dh2022.dhii.asia/abstracts/163.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (2023). The Riddle of Literary Quality: A Computational Approach. Amsterdam University Press.

Installation

Install the package from the CRAN repository:

install.packages("litRiddle")

Alternatively, try installing it directly from the current GitHub repository:

library(devtools)
install_github("karinavdo/LitRiddleData", build_vignettes = TRUE)

Usage

The package is complemented with a concise vignette, which can be accessed via:

vignette("litRiddle")

This document will briefly guide the users through the functions of the package, but please expect some rough edges: the document will be revised in the future. A comprehensive yet rather low-level documentation of the package is provided – obviously – via the generic help() function in R. Try typing e.g.:

help(books)
help(respondents)
help(reviews)
help(frequencies)
help(motivations)
help(motivations.text)
help(combine.all)
help(explain)
help(find.dataset)
help(get.columns)
help(make.table)
help(make.table2)
help(order.responses)
help(litRiddle) # for the general description of the package

Each function of the package, as well as each dataset, is supplemented by a help page.

A concise description of the package's functionalities (in Dutch) is also provided here: https://karinavdo.github.io/RaadselLiteratuur/02_07_data_en_R_package.html.

General info

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (2023). The Riddle of Literary Quality: A Computational Approach. Amsterdam University Press.

Karina van Dalen-Oskam (2021). Het raadsel literatuur. Is literaire kwaliteit meetbaar? Amsterdam University Press.

Maciej Eder, Saskia Lensink, Joris van Zundert, Karina van Dalen-Oskam (2022). “Replicating The Riddle of Literary Quality: The litRiddle package for R”, in: Digital Humanities 2022 Conference Abstracts. The University of Tokyo, Japan, 25–29 July 2022, p. 636-637 https://dh2022.dhii.asia/dh2022bookofabsts.pdf

Corina Koolen, Karina van Dalen-Oskam, Andreas van Cranenburgh, Erica Nagelhout (2020). Literary quality in the eye of the Dutch reader: The National Reader Survey. Poetics 79: 101439, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.poetic.2020.101439.

More publications can be found at https://literaryquality.huygens.knaw.nl/?page_id=588