On Aug 17, 2017, at 2:54 PM, Eric Lease Morgan <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> A man who might be called Mr. R is coming to give a talk here at Notre Dame. More specifically, a person named Hadley Wickham will be giving a presentation here on campus, August 28 from 5 - 6:30 in Jordon Hall, Room 101. Hadley Wickham comes all the way from Australia and has had a more-than-significant hand in the development & adoption of the programming language called “R”.


Yesterday a man named Hadley Wickham — somebody who we might call Mr. R — gave a a presentation on the topic of data science,  and I thought it was both interesting as well as apropos to this group. Some of my take-aways included:

  * “If you are not programming, then you are not doing data science."

  * “Data science is an interactive process” (as illustrated in the attachment).

  * “When doing data science, don’t forget to embrace humanity.”

  * “There are five ‘verbs’ of data science: 1) select, 2) filter,
    3) mutate, 4) summarize, and 5) arrange

While I do not have the same level of authority when compared to Wickham, I often need to explain to the students & faculty to whom I provide services that the work I do is truly iterative. This sort of computing is NOT: 1) get input, 2) do processing, and 3) produce output. Instead it is: 1) get input, 2) do processing, 3) produce output, and 4) go to Step #1. Like other forms of scholarship, it is a never-ending process.

Finally, here are two links pointing to much fuller explanations of Wickham’s ideas regarding data science:

  * Tidyverse - http://www.tidyverse.org
  * R for Data Science - http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

Sometime in the near future, there will probably be a recording to watch. I will pass it along when & if I learn of the link.

—
Eric Morgan
Hesburgh Libraries
University of Notre Dame