@annakrystalli Yes, you’ve definitely got the superior (any, really) workflow to get metadata in when it doesn’t exist yet.
My RStudio addin is an attempt to make it available more easily during analysis (something that Stata/SPSS users are very much used to). But one could e.g. also generalize some of what I did with my plots to get easier auto-labelling of plots from metadata.
csvy sounds cool, didn’t know about that, or forgot about it. Yeah, duplication and metadata proliferation is something to worry about, but having it ship in one file is definitely something worth aiming for. And interoperability with SPSS/Stata is pretty useful too. I’m not sure whether you based the dataspice CSV files around any particular standard (EML?) or was it more ad-hoc?
Happy to talk more when I return from holidays in ca. 3 weeks, so we don’t duplicate work and exchange ideas. Btw. I think we’ve met at your ReproHack at OpenCONN.