Materials for the 2019 GESIS workshop "Data Wrangling & Exploration with the Tidyverse in R"
Johannes Breuer ([email protected], @MattEagle09); Stefan Jünger ([email protected]); Thomas Ebel
Before researchers can start to analyze their data, they first have to wrangle (i.e., clean and transform) and explore them. While this can be done with base R, the syntax for this is typically verbose and not intuitive and, hence, difficult to learn, remember, and read. The tidyverse addresses this problem by providing a consistent syntax that is also easy to read, learn, and remember. The tidyverse website describes it as “an opinionated collection of R packages designed for data science” and points out that “all packages share an underlying design philosophy, grammar, and data structures”. These attributes make the tidyverse especially attractive for novice R users. In this workshop, we will introduce participants to the tidyverse and its packages and relevant concepts like tidy data and the pipe operator. In the practical parts of the workshop, we will focus on wrangling (importing, tidying, transforming) and exploring (with a focus on visualization) the data. For the exercises, we will use RStudio. The course is meant for R beginners who are looking for an accessible, hands-on introduction to the first steps of working with data in R as well as more advanced R users who want to switch from base R to the tidyverse for their data wrangling and exploration tasks.