R: Basic Spatial and the Tidyverse

Base R can be kind of a mess. If you find yourself writing line after line like this…

var <- ...
var_trans <- ....
var_trans_wide <- ...

…you can wind up with very long-winded code that is not especially readable. This is where the so-called ‘Tidyverse’ can help you. In addition, R makes a huge number of spatial operations very available via the sf package; this makes scripting your spatial analysis and large GIS batch-processing tasks a into a simple task that sits comfortably within the Tidyverse. We shouldn’t make too much of data ‘cleanliness’; as Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein point out, there is just as much room for messy, unscalable data science as there is for scalable, ‘clean’ techniques. However, there is no denying that when data cleaning becomes necessary, the Tidyverse makes it simpler.