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 tableThis means we end up with a data set that is in a long, skinny format instead of a wide format. Tidy data sets are easier to work with, and this is no less true when one starts to work with text. Most of the tooling and infrastructure needed for text mining with tidy data frames already exists in packages like dplyr, broom, tidyr, and ggplot2. Our goal in writing the tidytext package is to provide functions and supporting data sets to allow conversion of text to and from tidy formats, and to switch seamlessly between tidy tools and existing text mining packages.
Source: The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Text
Robin Edgar
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