Working with SNiGB
2 March 2026
This week is a time to reflect on what we have learned in the first half of the semester before Spring Break. We will explore a new dataset as a way to see how everyone is feeling about organization, Markdown, R, data wrangling, and visualization, while introducing Quarto documents.
Reading
- Hadley Wickham, “A personal history of the tidyverse”.
- Hadley Wickham et al., R for Data Science.
- Chapter 3: Data transformation
- Chapter 4: Code style
- Chapter 7: Data import
- Chapter 20: Spreadsheets
Assignment
- First self reflection due. 2–3 paragraph self reflection on how things are going, what questions you have, and what you are excited about learning. See the assignments page for details. You can turn in self reflections through email.
- Download the SNiGB data into the
data-raw/folder in yourr-notesproject, reate asnigb.Rfile in your scripts folder, and explore the data.- Download the SNiGB data from this GoogleDrive.
- What interests you in the data? What questions do you think you might be able to answer given the nature of the data? See if you can make some exploratory data visualizations. Record your thoughts in code comments and in your commonplace book.
Activities
- Continue Wrangling data with dplyr
- Pair and share: What were you able to explore in your script? What are you interested to explore in greater depth?
- Introduction to Quarto documents
- Discussion: Current thoughts and next steps
Resources
Quarto
- Resources: Quarto documents
- Quarto cheat sheet
- The Quarto documentation is great and comprehensive. A good place to start is with the Getting started tutorial.
- Wickham et al., R for Data Science
- Chapter 28: Quarto
- Chapter 29: Quarto formats