Developing your data skills

How to keep learning with TidyTuesday

Welcome to the resources for the Developing your data skills: How to keep learning with TidyTuesday session at the RSS International Conference 2026.

Abstract

TidyTuesday is a weekly social data project which aims to make learning to work with data easier, by providing real-world datasets. Participants are encouraged to explore the data, create an output such as a data visualisation or a Shiny app, and share their output alongside their code, with the community. It’s a good way for people interested in data to work with a wide range of datasets, develop their programming skills, and build a portfolio of work. However, getting started with data challenges like TidyTuesday can feel daunting, especially when it comes to sharing your work with other people.

In this session, a brief introduction to TidyTuesday will be given alongside some tips for how you might approach the data and decide on what you want to focus on. The remainder of the session will be an interactive workshop where participants will be using either R or Python (or another language of their choice) to practice data wrangling and visualisation using TidyTuesday data.

By the end of the session, participants will have developed their data skills, started creating a portfolio piece, and feel more confident about sharing their projects and work with others.

Organised by Nicola Rennie for Software, Technology and Reproducibility in Statistics (STARS) group.