Class 9 notes

Data diary - a good practice

A data diary is a log you want to keep as you’re working with your data and on your analysis. Write in it any time you make a judgement call about your data or maybe have a question you think is important but don’t want to interrupt your flow to track down at the moment.

For example, maybe there is a variable in your data you don’t quite understand so you decide to move on without it. Make a note just in case that turns out to be relevant later.

Another example - maybe you make a judgement call in your data cleaning. You’ve got one person named Bob Smith and one person named Robert Smith and you don’t have any easy way to figure out whether they are the same person. You aren’t sure exactly how you will use this data or results, so it may not end up being relevant. So you decide to combine them in your data as the same person, for now. Make a note of it!

Technical terms

One student had feedback that it might be helpful to spend time learning more technical terms, which would help when seeking help online. I will try to emphasize those more. Starting with: consider some of the most fundamental terms when you are looking for help online. For example, the structure of data as I tried to outline on the Dataframes slide in Class 4: https://rpubs.com/egawthrop/decoding_class4

On your class 8 quiz, many people responding with the select() function being used to choose certain data to work with. That is true, but specifically it is choosing specific variables (also known as columns) to work with. Using the word “variable” or even column instead of just generically “data” will help you get more targeted results when searching for help online. Learning what to google – i.e. learning what problem you are fundamentally trying to solve – is honestly like 80% of learning to code. It will take time and effort and trial and error to get there.

I suggest referencing your cheat sheets as one way to get more familiar with technical terms. And perhaps sometimes your google search might be “what is the technical word for ____ in R?” or vice versa.