Why data carpentry?

“Give me six hours to chop down a tree and I will spend the first four sharpening the axe.”

• Hadley Wickham became (nerd) famous largely due to his formalization of tidy data.
  • Each variable is a column.
  • Each observation is a row.
  • Each type of observational unit is a table.
• Consistent structure means downstream tools can be built to expect that structure.