Tidy Data (Hadley Wickham)

Details

Photo

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Name

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Field

Data science

Year

2014

Core idea

If each variable is a column, each observation a row, and each table a type of observational unit, everything downstream gets easier.

Why it stuck

Turned my chaotic CSVs into something almost Zen; also justified my obsession with renaming columns until they feel right.

Read where

On a work-issued laptop at a Brooklyn kitchen table, then immediately applied to a very messy Excel export.