Homework 3: the Terminal & Beginning Python

LIN 301: Computation for Linguists

Author

Dr. Andrew M. Byrd

Part 1: Terminal (Setup)

Open your Terminal in RStudio.
Navigate (cd) into your course repo folder (LIN_301).
Make a new folder called hw3_files.
Download the file shakespeare.txt from Project Gutenberg into that folder (use curl). The file is located at this address: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/100/pg100.txt.
Confirm the file is in your folder with the ls command.

Create a new Quarto doc called hw3.qmd with a Python code chunk.

In the first part of your Quarto doc, run the following code. This assigns the text found in shakespeare.txt to a variable named text.

with open("hw3_files/shakespeare.txt", "r", encoding="utf-8") as f:
    text = f.read()

Using the method .split()[:1000], take the first 1000 words (in the order they appear) and store them in a list called first_words.
Print the list.
Print the 500th item in the list.

Now pick 10 of the words from your first_words list. You should pick super common ones (like ‘the’) and rarer ones, too.
Manually place these 10 words in a new list called chosen_ones.

You’re now going to create a third list, called bill, that will contain all of the words of Shakespeare. As before, use the method .split() to split shakespeare.txt into separate words.
Use the method .count() to see how many times each chosen appears in the text.
Create a dictionary called word_counts that pairs each chosen word with its number.
Do not manually insert the counts in your dict. You should use the format: "word": text.count("word").

At the bottom of your hw3.qmd, write a short (3–5 sentence) reflection: