11  Mean Heights of Countries Over Time

Readings

Scan through the following,

  1. Chapter 27.1 - 27.3 A Field Guide to Base R: R for Data Science (2nd ed)
    • This will be helpful in learning to subset/reference elements of vectors and lists (and consequently dataframe and tibbles as well)
  2. Chapter 20.2.1 - 20.2.4 Reading Excel: R for Data Science (2nd ed)
  3. Chapter 20.3 - 20.4 Reading Google Sheets: R for Data Science (2nd ed)
  4. readxl R package
  5. downloader R package
  6. cheatsheet
Tip

The guided instruction for importing data may be particularly helpful.

Guided Instruction

Data structure and tibbles

Data structures and importing data

The Scientific American argues that humans have been getting taller over the years. As the data scientists that we are becoming, we would like to find data that validates this concept.

This project is not as severe as the two quotes below, but it will give you a taste of pulling various data and file formats together into “tidy” data for visualization and analysis.

“Classroom data are like teddy bears and real data are like a grizzly bear with salmon blood dripping out its mouth.” Jenny Bryan

“Up to 80% of data analysis is spent on the process of cleaning and preparing data” Hadley Wickham

  1. Read in and tidy the Worldwide heights estimates .xlsx file. After tidying the data it should look something like this (this is just a snippet of a part of the dataset, yours will have more rows of course).
Code country height.cm year_decade
56 Belgium 163.1 1810
280 Federal Republic of Germany (until 1990) 167.8 1810
250 France 163.9 1810
276 Germany 167.8 1810
528 Netherlands 166.0 1810
246 Finland 171.9 1810
  1. Make a plot fit for presentation, with decade on the x-axis and and all the countries’ heights in inches on the y-axis; with the points from Germany highlighted based on the data from the .xlsx file.
  2. Write a paragraph to summarize how you would respond to the assertion that humans are getting taller over the years. (Does your data tell a story?)
  3. Render the .qmd file. Push all the files created in the rendering process into your GitHub repository.

Submit

In I-learn submit a link to the .md file on GitHub.