Data Literate Documents: an initial outline

This is a "braindump" of a vision for "data literate documents" derived from the experience i would like to have publishing and sharing data and data driven documents.

What I want …

The basic need I have is:

I want to do this in a way that is simple and sustainable - I want to know this material will still be around and accessible in 5 or 10y (at the least). This likely means not doing this in a proprietary format or in a proprietary platform.

Observations

• Markdown is becoming a lingua franca for writing developer and even research docs
  • It's quick and ascii-like
  • It's widely supported
  • It's extensible …
• Frontend tooling is rapidly evolving …
  • The distant between code and a tool is declining => I might as well write code … (rather than using a specific tool to analysis and visualize data)
• MDX = Markdown + react
• RStudio did this a while ago …
• Missing part is data …
  • You have juputer notebooks etc … => they are quite high end / geeky …

Notebooks (jupyter, literate programming) ⟹

• Write text and code together
• Write code like in a terminal
• Data oriented

Here the kinds of doc i want to write

A Dataset Example

# Global Solar Supply (Annual)

Solar energy supply globally.

Source: International Energy Association https://www.iea.org/reports/solar-pv.

| Year | Generation (TWh) | % of total energy |
|--|--|
|2008|12|
|2009|20|
|2010|32|
|2011|63|
|2012|99|
|2013|139|
|2014|190|
|2015|251|
|2016|329|
|2017|444|
|2018|585|
|2019|720| 2.7 |

Europe Brent Spot Prices (Annual/ Monthly/ Weekly/ Daily) from U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA).

Source: https://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/RBRTEd.htm

Notes

R Markdown - https://rmarkdown.rstudio.com