3 Working with data

American shad, the best fish, lost in the data deluge. Let’s figure out how to make some sense of it.

The purpose of this chapter is to get you comfortable working with data in R and give you some tools for summarizing those data in a meaningful way. This is not meant to be a comprehensive treatment of these subjects but rather an introduction to the tools that are available to you (say it with me: “Worst Stats Text eveR”). There are a lot of tools out there and you may come up with something that works better for you once you have some basics under your belt.

Now that you have a handle on the types of data you can expect to run into in R, let’s have a look at how we read and work with data that we get from the real world.

We will work with the ctr_fish.csv file for Chapter 3, so you will need to download the class data sets that go with this book to play along. We will also need the tidyverse package, but instructions for installation are provided below because this is the first time we have downloaded and installed a package.