[R] Managing Data

[Jonathan Baron]

It is hard to know what kind of projects you have, but one
approach, among many, is outlined in the beginning of
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/~baron/rpsych.htm
It involves keeping raw data in separate files, each with
a name (supposedly a useful mnemonic), such as cba1.data,
and scripts in other separate files, such as cba1.R.  The
script cba1.R has something like
read.table("cba1.data")
as its first line, and it contains all the useful transformations
and analyses (some commented out) discovered so far.  I do not
use the files that R stores at all.  Rather, I edit the ..R file
with ESS (which allows me to go back and forth to R itself).

As I say, this is one approach among many.  I think R has many
tools that can help develop alternative approaches, such as
setwd() for changing directories.

For editing data I use (X)emacs, but you could also use a
spreadsheet, or something fancier, or R itself, with the
write() command for saving what you've edited.

Jon Baron
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