Dear (Fellow) Data Librarians, I wanted to promote an invitation to join an R for Data Science co-learning group this summer. Zoë Saldaña at Cornell and I are co-facilitating, and it would be great to work with you on this if you're interested. More info here: #TidyTuesday is an ongoing weekly challenge in the R for Data Science community (a community of R practitioners focused on the R book of the same name). The challenge is to analyze a new dataset on the fly as a means of practicing the exploratory data analysis methods put forward by Hadley Wickham and others in the #rstats community. Our goal is to create a community of practice for data librarians who want to participate in #TidyTuesday and share their findings, methods, and questions with each other in a fun, low-stakes virtual community environment. If you are interested, we’d love to include you in the co-learning group! The group will run from early June to late August. All interested folks will be invited to join the Data Libs Slack, where we will facilitate conversations around the weekly TidyTuesday challenges (among other things!) Every other week, we will host a Zoom video conference which will be the primary community event of the co-learning group. Meredith and Zoë will alternate facilitating the group, and we will invite one or two interested participants every session to share their exploratory data analysis and/or try their hand at live-data analysis (not at all necessary, but a potentially fun way to take chances together!) In June, we will focus on the R for Data Science book in particular and build up the steps of the data analysis process as we go. (We’d recommend that you take a look at the Explore and Wrangle sections before June if you’re new to the tidyverse in R, or to brush up.) In July and August, we’ll continue exploring, visualizing, and otherwise playing with the #TidyTuesday datasets, and focus on particular methods/toolkits/etc. as the need arises. Our goal is to create an environment where we can support each other and benefit from project-based learning together. Our first virtual meeting would be Tuesday, June 4th, continuing biweekly from there. If you're interested, please shoot me an e-mail ([email protected]). I can give you an invite to the Slack. Once we have a group of interested folks, we'll send out a poll to figure out the exact time we would like to start meeting. And if you know of any colleagues who may be interested as well, please forward along the message. Thank you for your time! Meredith Broadway
