After a recent Introduction to R workshop, a participant asked me a question. She works with data that comes to her with all numeric values, but these numeric actually represent character values. Every time she receives new data, she has to recode it manually in Excel, a situation she described to me via email: A […]
How to Clean Messy Data in R
If you work with data, you know that you often spend as much — if not more — time gathering, wrangling, and cleaning your data as you do analyzing it. A 2014 New York Times article cites the truism that data scientists spend at least half of their time cleaning data. R offers a wide […]
My R Journey: Harkanwal Singh
Harkanwal Singh is a data visualisation programmer, currently working at Westpac NZ. Previously, he established and led the data journalism desk at the New Zealand Herald. He is passionate about visualisation as code. He programs in R, JavaScript and Python. He enjoys teaching data visualisation in his own time. He loves reading words and code, […]
How to Make Beautiful Tables in R
It doesn’t matter how good your data analysis is if you don’t effectively communicate your results. In most reports, communication of results happens through a combination of data visualization and tables. Along with narrative text, these make up the bulk of content used to communicate results. Clear writing is a topic for another venue. Data […]
My R Journey: Jon Harmon
Jon Harmon is one of the friendliest, most helpful people you’ll come across in the R community (and, in a community known for being incredibly welcoming, that’s saying something!). If you’re involved at all with the R for Data Science Online Learning Community, you’ve likely seen his posts. There, he tries to “pay it forward” […]
How to Make Functions in R
R is a functional programming language. Most of the time, you use other people’s functions. But, as you become a more experienced R user, you may want to start making your own functions. For most people, the idea of making your first function comes when you realize you are copying and pasting code over and […]
