steward

The goal of steward is to make it easier to import, manage, and publish the metadata associated with data frames. This might be useful for:

• documenting a dataset for a package
• publishing a data-dictionary table in an R Markdown document

Our current definition of metadata includes the name, description and source of a dataset, as well as the name, type, and description of each of the variables in the dataset.

The name, steward, is an homage to the Data Stewardship class taught by Andee Kaplan and Ranae Dietzel (also an author of this package) at Iowa State University in Fall 2016.

This package was first built collaboratively at the Uncoast Unconf, held at Des Moines in April 2019.

Installation

You can install the development version of steward from GitHub with:

# install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("uncoast-unconf/steward")

Usage

In our getting started article, we describe some common tasks:

• create a “steward” dataset.
• write a dataset to a package, with documentation.
• create a gt table.

Future development

We plan to release this package to CRAN as soon as the gt package is released there.

Some of the capabilities we plan to develop:

• take into account timezone as column metadata.
• for readr and vroom, a way to build a column specification to read a flat-file.
• build metadata from package-documentation (.Rd file)

Related work

The codebook package can help you manage dataset metadata.

Code of conduct

Please note that the {steward} project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing to this project, you agree to abide by its terms.