bellybutton data: great example

[jennybc]

Next time someone develops lesson material, this might make a fantastic worked example or lab or exercise. I'd like to eventually work it up myself but putting it here in case anyone gets to it first.

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

[tracykteal]

Also microbes! I definitely like this dataset.

[jennybc]

@tracykteal It could also work for Data Carpentry. I just put it here because I don't want to forget about it but don't go back into teaching mode 'til fall.