EconomicTracker VS tidytuesday

https://github.com/OpportunityInsights/Economic Covid and unemployment etc

https://github.com/OpportunityInsights/EconomicTracker - One of my current favorites, this is some data being used to track the US economic recovery post COVID. This has a ton of interesting things - Covid related data (including things like lockdown dates, changes in local policy, unemployment changes, etc. at the state and local levels), employment, consumer spending, education related statistics, and Google/Apple mobility reports.

However, as others have mentioned, you may want to look at the effects at a local level. There is/was quite a bit of heterogeneity in responses and effects across localities that may cause you some issues when you aggregate up - thanks a lot Simpson’s paradox. If you’re looking for a nice US dataset that has details around local lockdowns/Covid related policy changes, Opportunity Insights’ Track the Recovery dataset is pretty useful.

TidyTuesday is a weekly data cleaning project where a new, interesting data source is linked to each week: https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday

For R, I don't have specific resources, but I remember I started out with doing tidytuesdays challenge (https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday).

Tidy Tuesday has data and links to more data. The nice thing about those data sets is that you can search for what other people did with the data on social media (e.g. Twitter).

Dataset: https://github.com/rfordatascience/tidytuesday/tree/master/data/2022/2022-11-01

What you're describing is contributing to open source. Some things I'd suggest doing: - learn some git first - create GitHub account and create at least a practice repo - look at learning community-related repos, like Tidy Tuesday - follow R "power" users, people associated with RStudio, and similar folks on social media. Those folks will sometimes mention projects aimed at beginners.

Data: TidyTuesday April 4

The Tidy Tuesday git repo has a lot of example datasets to work with.

I mostly use ggplot2 in R for visualisations which means that The R Graph Gallery is my starting point for inspiration. The best thing to do is start with a simple idea that tells a story, and one of the best guys out there that does this is Cedric Scherer. He is involved a bit with the TidyTuesday project which I wish I had more time to play around with, and is a great starting point for developing a library of vis techniques.