Week 2

R & Tidy Data

You survived the first week! I hope your classes are off to a good start. Although we don’t have class this week (Labor Day), we will still have readings and an assignment. Please view this page to make sure you have all the information you need to get going.

We are going to work on expanding our comfort with the syntax in R and using the tidyverse for some more data wrangling. We will import some new data, and compute some new values. This will be a skill that will be useful no matter what data you are working with. There will be plenty of practice with this!

Stylized text providing an overview of Tidy Data. The top reads “Tidy data is a standard way of mapping the meaning of a dataset to its structure. - Hadley Wickham.” On the left reads “In tidy data: each variable forms a column; each observation forms a row; each cell is a single measurement.” There is an example table on the lower right with columns ‘id’, ‘name’ and ‘color’ with observations for different cats, illustrating tidy data structure.

There are two sets of anthropomorphized data tables. The top group of three tables are all rectangular and smiling, with a shared speech bubble reading “our columns are variables and our rows are observations!”. Text to the left of that group reads “The standard structure of tidy data means that “tidy datasets are all alike…” The lower group of four tables are all different shapes, look ragged and concerned, and have different speech bubbles reading (from left to right) “my column are values and my rows are variables”, “I have variables in columns AND in rows”, “I have multiple variables in a single column”, and “I don’t even KNOW what my deal is.” Next to the frazzled data tables is text “...but every messy dataset is messy in its own way. -Hadley Wickham.”

On the left is a happy cute fuzzy monster holding a rectangular data frame with a tool that fits the data frame shape. On the workbench behind the monster are other data frames of similar rectangular shape, and neatly arranged tools that also look like they would fit those data frames. The workbench looks uncluttered and tidy. The text above the tidy workbench reads “When working with tidy data, we can use the same tools in similar ways for different datasets…” On the right is a cute monster looking very frustrated, using duct tape and other tools to haphazardly tie data tables together, each in a different way. The monster is in front of a messy, cluttered workbench. The text above the frustrated monster reads “...but working with untidy data often means reinventing the wheel with one-time approaches that are hard to iterate or reuse.”

Cute fuzzy monsters putting rectangular data tables onto a conveyor belt. Along the conveyor belt line are different automated “stations” that update the data, reading “WRANGLE”, “VISUALIZE”, and “MODEL”. A monster at the end of the conveyor belt is carrying away a table that reads “Complete analysis.”

“Illustrations from the Openscapes blog Tidy Data for reproducibility, efficiency, and collaboration by Julia Lowndes and Allison Horst”

Prepare

  • Be sure to have read the chapters!

  • Download the data for this week

Download From Drive (CSV)

Slides

None (Labor Day)

In-Class Activity

No Class this week (Labor Day)

For Next Time

📋Lab 2 - Getting Comfy with Data Wrangling

📖Read Chapter 5 - LSR

📖Read Chapter 1 & 3 - R4DS



Back to course schedule ⏎