Review use of reshape2 package vs tidyr

[spencerpease]

The reshape2 package has been succeeded by the tidyr package as the "tidyverse" standard for tidying data. From the tidyr website:

tidyr replaces reshape2 (2010-2014) and reshape (2005-2010). Somewhat counterintuitively each iteration of the package has done less. tidyr is designed specifically for tidying data, not general reshaping (reshape2), or the general aggregation (reshape).

We should check if our usage of reshape2 can be replaced with tidyr functions, since that is what our more recent functions make use of.

Rstudio has a neat "Find in Files" command (CMD/Ctrl + Shift + F) for searching packages that could be useful here.

[jonathancallahan]

From: https://rpubs.com/sterding/Reshape2_and_Tidyr

method	wide->long	long->wide
reshape2	melt	cast
tidyr	gather	spread
spreadsheet	unpiovt	pivot
database	fold	unfold