NEWS

multicastR 21-02-22

removed dependency on the data.table package
functions multicast, mc_metadata, mc_referents, and mc_clauses have been fully rewritten to output data.frames instead of data.tables
the version index (as retrieved by function mc_index) now includes the number of corpora in each version of the collection instead of an explicit list of corpora and has a slightly reshuffled column order
removed the mc_table function for its lack of practical utility
removed a number of previously hidden functions for file conversion; these will be made available in the future as a standalone package available from the Multi-CAST website
consequently, multicastR no longer imports a number of packages (stringi, curl, xml2, XML, xtable, gsubfn) used by these functions

the reflex column in multicastR tables has been renamed to isnref
function mc_referents now takes an optional argument vkey to select specific versions of the lists of referents
function mc_metadata now takes an optional argument vkey to select specific versions of the metadata
updated repository links
updated documentation
removed the legacy.colnames argument from function multicast
removed function mcindex (use mc_index instead)
removed function mc_count_clauses (use mc_clauses instead)

new function mc_metadata: download a table containing all corpus metadata from the repository
new function mc_referents: download a bundled list of all discourse referents (as annotated with the RefIND scheme, Schiborr et al. 2018) from the repository
new function mc_clauses: replaces function mc_count_clauses
function mc_count_clauses is now deprecated
fixed an issue with mc_clauses (and mc_count_clauses) when bytext = TRUE

the file column in multicastR tables has been renamed to text
the word column in multicastR tables has been renamed to gword
for backwards compatibility, the multicast function now has a legacy.colnames argument that, if set to TRUE, outputs tables with the old column names; this option will be removed in the future
new function mc_count_clauses (WIP): produces a table containing the number of clause units in each corpus or text
new function mc_table (WIP): tabulate counts of GRAID symbols
new function mc_index: replaces function mcindex
function mcindex is now deprecated
updated repository links
repository files now have the file extension TSV (rather than TXT)
updated description
updated citation