Data Viz in R: Week 5

Project Progress!

Artwork by @allison_horst

Iterate, iterate, iterate!

And think about

Titles, captions, axis labels
Providing context via legends, annotations, background grids and axis ticks, reference lines, labeling
Text size (readability, relative to figure)
Telling a story: a series of visualizations presented in an order that builds and reveals

To the Script!

Themes: built themes from ggplot or other packages: https://r-charts.com/ggplot2/themes/
Themes: customizing themes - https://ggplot2-book.org/polishing.html
Annotating: annotate() - not a geom (doesn’t accept mappings/things that vary) but can use geoms (text, point, segment, etc.)
Combining: patchwork - A ggplot composer that makes it “ridiculously easy” to arrange multiple plots into a single figure!

Sometimes you just want a table, especially in an interactive report (R Markdown style). Tables are great for

Options for creating better tables:

knitr::kable + kableExtra: The kable() function, “a very simple table generator,” is defined by the knitr package. Probably the easiest “pretty” table in R Markdown.
DT::datatable: The datatable() function provides an R interface to the JavaScript library DataTables to produce interactive tables; automatically searchable, sortable.

To the Script!

See the Keye’s post for more on gt, reactable and others!

A (zipped) folder with

The original data you’re using (unless it’s downloaded in the script)
An .R script that reads the original data, performs any cleaning, mutating, filtering, selecting, joining, reshaping, etc. needed for visualization and exports
An .RDS file (R’s data format) – this will retain all of the changes you’ve made in the cleaning script, including setting or labeling factor levels and geometry/spatial information (things that will be dropped if exported to a .csv file)
An .Rmd file that reads in the prepared .RDS data, generates the visuals, and contains the narrative (within the .Rmd file, you should be sure to cite your data, and provide a link to it if it is publicly available)
The knitted .html file created by knitting the .Rmd file

R Markdown can be rendered to formats other than HTML, but HTML files are easy to host online and share! Two possibilities

RPubs allows free hosting of static single-file R Markdown content – just click the “Publish” button on your html file!
GitHub Pages, if you’re a GitHub user, allows hosting of Markdown and HTML files from the GitHub repository (that’s how my other class page is hosted)
A web server like Netlify (Here’s a great webinar on sharing R markdown files, and other sources, on Netlify)

See the chapter in Xie’s R Markdown book for more!