Arthur Goldhammer, a most excellent translator – and nice person – translated many parts of our book from the 2008, French original and edited the new and revised parts from our non-native and certainly inelegant English. Here, we are left to own our devices. So do not hesitate to (gently) comment on our mistakes, especially if they impede comprehension.We have firsthand knowledge of the fact that good research is written and published in many languages, not just English. The French version of our book focused on French-speaking references, so that readers who already discovered new methods were not hindered by language. The English version, published by a US Press, favors English-speaking references and examples in US history. We have also tried to cite more papers and books addressing the history of countries other than the USA and France, but we know that we can do better in this respect and will try to use this blog to add such references. We will hopefully also be able to add references in languages other than French and English, although, of course, we cannot claim to read them all. Do not hesitate to suggest us such references, using comments or e-mails.
Finally, we will also try to point to tutorials written in languages other than English. We know that, as learning methods and software already requires an effort, it is more comfortable to use a tutorial written in one’s mother tongue. For now, as we have few pointers in other languages, we will gather them here.
- a very useful webpage translating function names in Excel (those are generally the same in Openoffice and Libreoffice) into many languages – only European ones, but it’s a start. A free add-in (but you have to install it), only for Excel, also includes many non-European languages.
- For many beginners, RCommander is a good way to start using R. Fortunately, introductory videos exist in several languages, including (but perhaps not limited to) Spanish, German, and French.
- Note that the interfaces of R generally automatically adapt to the language that you use on your computer.
- Multilingual resources (literature lists, tutorials, etc.) on network analysis are maintained by the excellent Historical Network Research group. German is especially well represented.
- Documentation for IRaMuteQ (text analysis) in Portuguese; there are also Portuguese (and French) tutorials on YouTube; a slightly older written tutorial in Spanish.
- A succinct presentation of many types of text analysis software in Italian.
We plan to publish a revised edition of our French book; we will then (hopefully) provide a French version for everything that is addressed here. Meanwhile, our old companion website still includes some useful tutorials. Other interesting resources in French include:
- on using computers in history generally, La Boîte à outils des historien⋅nes
- excellent tutorials and pointers, especially regarding R and its libraries, written for the social sciences but mostly very readable for humanists, in Quanti/Sciences sociales
- references on network analysis in French on Réseaux et histoire (for historians) and GDR Analyse de réseaux (for humanists and social scientists generally)
- R_en_clair_SHS: a hands-on introduction to R by Maelle Amand (intended for students in lingustics and phonetics but also good for the other humanistic and social scientific disciplines).
- a very simple guide for RCommander and introductory statistics, by Jean-Philippe Gaudron.
- for factor analysis: FactoMineR is a French package with excellent French documentation.
- for network analysis: tutorials for most of the tools mentioned here can be found on the websites of groupeFMR or GDR “Analyse de réseaux”. There are also pointers on the website Réseaux et histoire.
- for text analysis: the same is true for IRaMuTeQ.