Week 2 – Importing/Exporting Data in R
This week I continued learning R and R Studio through the R for Journalists tutorials. While last week’s learnings were more focused on the basics, this week I actually started working with data. The first step to dealing with data in R is actually importing it! Luckily, R has many packages that allow for users to import various different types of data like CSV files, Excel files, delimited text, JSON data, and more!
Last semester I took an Interactive Data Visualization course in which we explored various JavaScript libraries related to working with data objects and creating data visualizations such as underscore.js, flot.js, flotr2.js, leaflet.js, and d3.js. Some data set types I am familiar with from this past course are: CSV files, TSV files, and JSON data.
I thought it was interesting how certain types of data sets in R need a package in order to import, while others do not. CVS files and delimited text, for example, can be imported through base R (even though sometimes using the readr package is easier), while others like SPSS, Excel, and JSON need specific packages in order to be imported.
