The at-home exercises should be completed using Posit cloud. Log in to your Posit account and open the project Exercise 1. Create a new .Rmd file (use File -> New File -> R Notebook.
I advise saving the new file straight away. Because you’ll submit this file as an assignment, use a standardised name: exercise_1_lastname_firstname. Regularly re-save the file.
When you have finished the exercise (or part of it), ‘knit’ the file. Export the .Rmd and the html as a .zip file, and upload this to the assignment area.
You’re working on a book history project, and you’re interested in finding out more about the most-used book formats. When books were still made by hand (up until the beginning of the nineteenth century), books were made by printing on a standard sized sheet of paper and then folding the paper a number of times to make the pages. This process determined the different sizes, or formats, of books.
The largest size (a single fold) was called folio, followed by quarto, octavo, and duodecimo. (you might have heard of the Shakespeare ‘first folio’, which is so named because it was the first time Shakespeare was published in folio format - individual plays had previously been published as quarto).
In the study of the book (bibliography), determing the format is important: folio-sized books were reserved for important and expensive publications which were meant to last. In a real-world example, we could do this on a large dataset of information from a book catalogue, to look for patterns and changes over time. In that case, we would usually do a similar calculation, but over a whole column of numbers.
In a first code cell, create two variables, called book_height and book_width. Set each to a number: make up some realistic values for book height and width in milimetres.
In a new code cell, write code that will multiply them together, and save this as a variable book_area.
Now, let’s calculate the area of a typical folio book. A full sheet of paper measured 500 x 740 mm. In a new code cell, write code to calculate the area, in millimeters squared, of a folio page (remember the full sheet of paper is also folded in half to make the page).
Any book which has an area equal or larger than this is considered folio size.
See below for the answer if you get stuck:
book_height <- 500
book_width <- 700
book_area <- book_height * book_width
folio_area <- (500 * 740) / 2 # the width multiplied by the height, divided by two
book_area >= folio_area # check if book area is greater than or equal to folio_area.[1] TRUEUsually when you create vectors, you can use either single or double quotation marks. What happens when you try to use single quotation marks here?
What happens to the fifth album title? Is it stored as a number or as characters?
Write code in a new code cell which checks if any of the strings in the vector are equal to “Renaissance”
Create a new vector, containing the titles of the top 5 ranked albums from this Variety article: Renaissance, Beyoncé, Lemonade, 4, and B’Day.
Now, check if any of these top-ranked albums are missing from the top-selling list.
The easiest way to compare two vectors is to use another command, %in%. This essentially says, check each of the elements of this vector to see if they are equal to any of the elements of this second vector:
e.g., vector_1 %in% vector_2