Discovering good data packages

Project participants:

Andy Teucher @ateucher
Richie Cotton @richierocks
Claudia Vitolo @cvitolo
Jakub Nowosad @Nowosad
Joe Stachelek @jsta

Most of us are involved in teaching R in some way, and it is always a struggle to find suitable datasets with which to teach, especially across domain expertise. There are many packages that have data, but finding them and knowing what is in them is a struggle due to inadequate documentation.

Goals:

Make it easy to discover suitable data
Write some guidance on documenting data in packages

Deliverables:

Google Doc which describes best practices for documentation.

Checklist of things to document.

Make sure your documentation answers as many of these questions as possible.

What does the data represent?
What format is the data in?
How big is the dataset?
Where does the come from?
How has the data been processed?
What does the data look like?
How do you analyze the data?
Where is this data used?
Is there a paper, or other external resource discussing this dataset?

A patch for usethis::use_readme_rmd() to display datasets in package README files.
A flexdashboard with a searchable table that shows metadata on datasets from many CRAN packages. It has information for over 4000 datasets.