Using gather to tidy a dataset
In order to represent the joined vote-topic data in a tidy form so we can analyze and graph by topic, we need to transform the data so that each row has one combination of country-vote-topic. This will change the data from having six columns (me
, nu
, di
, hr
, co
, ec
) to having two columns (topic
and has_topic
).
This exercise is part of the course
Case Study: Exploratory Data Analysis in R
Exercise instructions
- Load the
tidyr
package. - Gather the six topic columns in
votes_joined
into one column calledtopic
(containing one ofme
,nu
, etc.) and a column calledhas_topic
(containing 0 or 1). Print the result without saving it. - You don't actually care about the cases where
has_topic
is 0. Perform thegather()
operation again, but this time also filter for only the rows where the topic intopic
describes the vote. Save the result asvotes_gathered
.
Hands-on interactive exercise
Have a go at this exercise by completing this sample code.
# Load the tidyr package
# Gather the six me/nu/di/hr/co/ec columns
# Perform gather again, then filter