bellybutton data: great example

[jennybc]

Manually transferring from old STAT 545 website repo (STAT545-UBC/STAT545-UBC-original-website#47).

Copied from what I posted in datacarpentry/rr-organization1#41

Might make a good homework? For wrangling? Or data package creation?

Came to my attention via @zross and @Pakillo on twitter

Data on the biodiversity of belly buttons. You would get to say "belly button" a lot. And analyze innies vs outties.

http://navels.yourwildlife.org/bbb-project/results-and-data/

Basically they did lots of things right. It's a near miss. So fixing the problems is doable, would be very educational, and have a happy ending.

You could talk about

• renaming these files consistently
• depositing them somewhere more discoverable and persistent
• making data available in a non-proprietary format (it's xlsx only)
• within the xlsx (ok this heads into other areas, i.e. tidy data and spreadsheet hygiene)
  • there's gratuitous human-targeted annotation in the header row (screenshot below)
  • data stored in wide form, which is probably a good choice, but gives opportunity to discuss reshape after import
  • metadata in a second worksheet, which definitely makes sense, but gives opportunity to practice joins
  • human-targeted notes in a third worksheet which again makes sense, but gives opportunity to talk about what this would look like as, e.g. a git repository of a README plus 2 csv files and 1 or more R scripts
• data was collected in two waves, so there are two xlsx files; I've only looked at one, but I would bet $ that there are some interesting issues w/r/t extracting data from both spreadsheets and unifying into one dataset

[jennybc]

Of course the link above is dead but I have this: https://github.com/jennybc/bellybutton

[apreshill]

Just to finish the link circle: http://robdunnlab.com/projects/belly-button-biodiversity/

And don't worry, there is a petri dish portrait series: https://microbialart.tumblr.com/