Class 16
Further Steps in ggplot2 and visualization
Further Reading
No preparation reading was assigned, but we will/may refer to this material today:
Agenda
Today we’ll focus on:
- creating reports (thinking of homework project 1!)
- more data visualization
Some Sample Reports
Effective Data Visualization
An important piece of an effective report is effective visualization! This takes time to practice and learn, and you tend to develop some intuitions and personal practices once you work repeatedly with similar kinds of data. However there are some good pointers and principles to start from.
The best resource that I know that really addresses making choices in data visualization, and also provides the relevant R code, is Claus Wilke’s Fundamentals of Data Visualization, which is available as a print book without code, but also has an online version and R code available in the book code repository. It’s really a great resource.
For a quicker browse of some options and their code, R Graph Gallery is the place to go.
To make your plots more effective, once you chosen the relevant kind of plot, you also want to make sure they are well-annotated and labelled. First decide how you want it to look, and then you can use resources such as Wilke’s book, the ggplot2 book, Cédric Scherer’s materials or various other sources to figure out how to make the relevant changes to your code. See the Resources page for links to these.