The rimu package, which I published last week, does not use the tidyverse.
The operations that I do on multiple-response data would be easy using dplyr or purrrrrr with the data in long form: all responses stacked.
The problem is that dplyr and rlang are not automatically type-safe for this sort of multiple-response data.
It seems to be easier to define a multicolumn S3 class, which can then be put into a single column of a data frame, eg
bird_frame <- data.frame(location=location, birds=I(bird_presence))That way, we know that all the rows and columns are kept together appropriately, and we could (though I haven’t yet) define methods so that some inappropriate operations just fail.
The approach taken by tsibble works if you want an entire data frame to be a multiple-response object – the way you want an entire data frame to be a time-series object.
It would be interesting to see someone do a tidyversatile version for comparison, though.