When I went to the rOpenSci unconference about a month ago, I started work with Dave Robinson on a package for text mining using tidy data principles. What is this tidy data you keep hearing so much about? As described by Hadley Wickham, tidy data has a specific structure: each variable is a column each observation is a row each type of observational unit is a table This means we end up with a data set that is in a long, skinny format instead of a wide …