BROOKE WATSON
Last year, over 2500 immigrant children were separated from their family while in government custody. Information about their status is scattered across several government agencies, and throughout the national class-action lawsuit “Ms. L vs ICE,” the Analytics team of the ACLU has been using R to join, deduplicate, validate, and analyze it. Using specifics of this case, this talk will address common challenges arising from human-generated data in spreadsheets. With generalizable examples, I will discuss data tidying, standardization, deduplication, and validation using the tidyverse, janitor, assertthat, and other packages. Finally, I will share best practices for requesting useful data from non-quantitative subject matter experts.