Coding the Codebook

Today’s Agenda

• A project folder that holds the whole study
• Your codebook installed as a real document
• The data loaded, and looked at for the first time
• What to do when a line breaks

What We Build Today

Lab session

• A project folder holding the whole study
  • Your Chapter 8 codebook, installed as a document
  • The Twitch data, loaded and looked at
• No analysis today
  • We open, we load, we look
• Everything here becomes your White Paper method

Why the Folder Comes First

• You designed a study and never saw the data
• Reproducible work lives in files in known places
  • Not in commands typed once
• A project is one folder
  • Data, code, codebook, and report together
  • Nothing depends on a file only you have

Deciding where files go is friction, so we skip that decision.

Scaffolding the Project

v2v::new_portfolio("twitch-portfolio")

That one line creates the whole folder, already named and already wired together.

Note the v2v:: prefix. It says the function comes from this book’s package, so the package never becomes a hidden assumption.

What the Scaffold Gives You

twitch-portfolio/
├── twitch-portfolio.Rproj
├── _quarto.yml
├── README.md
├── codebook.qmd
├── analysis.qmd
├── data/
└── .Rprofile

You did not decide where anything goes or what to name it, which is the point.

Confirming the Stack

v2v::setup()

setup() checks that R, the packages this book depends on, and the project environment are all present and agree on versions.

• You met it once, when you installed the stack
• Run it every time you open the project
• You learn about a missing piece before it interrupts you

The Rulebook Becomes a Document

• One file in the scaffold is codebook.qmd
  • In Chapter 8 your codebook was an argument on paper
  • Now it is the reference every later step answers to
• Move the draft in, add a version line and a date
• A codebook that renders cleanly is one a coder can read

Loading the Data

library(tidyverse)

chat <- v2v::twitch_chat()
streams <- v2v::twitch_streams()

Line one loads the tidyverse; the next two fetch each table and name it with <-.

The data arrives through a function call, not a file path, which removes a whole category of beginner error. You get the working sample, not the full 2018 collection.

Looking, the Chat Table

glimpse(chat)

Rows: 35,267
Columns: 5
$ id      <int> 89, 551, 1033, 2094, 2803, …
$ channel <chr> "sodapoppin", "xqcow", "forsen", …
$ sender  <chr> "madzee", "prometheanow", "spectre155", …
$ message <chr> "???????????????????????", "TriEasy Clap TriEasy…
$ date    <dbl> 1542578127023, 1542578135562, 1542578143610, …

glimpse() prints every column, its type, and its first few values.

Reading That Output

• 35,267 rows, five columns, one message per row
• The first two messages are not errors
  • Twenty-three question marks, then copypasta
  • That is what Twitch chat contains
• date is a <dbl> and completely unreadable
  • Milliseconds since 1970, fixed in Chapter 11

Looking, the Stream Table

glimpse(streams)

Rows: 32,276
Columns: 6
$ channel <chr> "sodapoppin", "xqcow", "forsen", "giantwaffle", …
$ title   <chr> "Hello truckers\n44835158804929_2115841973", …
$ game    <chr> "Marble It Up!", "Just Chatting", "Artifact", …
$ viewers <int> 27934, 19381, 15300, 4697, 28076, …
$ date    <dbl> 1542578200214, 1542578200240, 1542578200273, …

Each row is one snapshot of one stream at one moment.

Counting What Channels Stream

streams %>% count(game, sort = TRUE)

   game                     n
 1 Art                   5298
 2 Fortnite              3682
 3 Just Chatting         2474
 4 Hearthstone           2157
 6 League of Legends     1952
# ℹ 50 more rows

count() tallies how often each value appears, and sort = TRUE puts the biggest first.

Confirming the Corpus

n_distinct(chat$channel)

[1] 50

• Fifty channels, the corpus described since Chapter 1
• n_distinct(streams$channel) returns the same fifty
• Sixty game categories across fifty channels
  • So most channels move around

Counting is how you check the data is what you were told it is.

When a Line Breaks

• R will return an error instead of a result
  • A misspelling, a package not loaded, a stray bracket
  • This happens to everyone, and is no verdict on you
• The Hub keeps a common-errors cheat sheet
• An error message is information, so read it first

Run ?v2v::common_errors for the ones specific to this data.

Checkpoint

You should now have:

• A twitch-portfolio folder, from new_portfolio()
• A clean v2v::setup() result
• Your codebook in codebook.qmd, versioned and rendered
• chat and streams loaded, and a glimpse() of each

Nothing changed in the data. Looking is all we did.

Before Thursday

• Finish moving your codebook into codebook.qmd and render it
• Due this week: Codebook and Qual Memo
  • The full codebook plus a 200 to 300 word memo
• Bring your glimpse() output on Thursday
  • We read the data against your codebook

Questions?