Graphics and Visualization in R

Midwest Big Data Summer School

May 17 2022

This workshop is designed to help you get started with creating elegant and high quality graphics in R, based on the ggplot2 package. The course will be data centric, with lots of different data sets that illustrate examples of the different techniques used for different problems.

The course will be a mix of instruction and follow-up exercises. You are encouraged to bring your own laptops, with software already loaded. A list of software will be available at this site several days prior to the workshop.

Useful References

Cheat Sheet for ggplot2 - 2 page reference card
ggplot2 book (3rd edition)

Slides and timetable

Date	Slide decks	Resources

1:30 - 2:15	Look at tidyverse functionality and an example	4-dplyr.R, 5-dplyr-examples.R	4-dplyr.Rmd, 5-dplyr-examples.Rmd
2:15 – 2:25	Short Break
2:25 - 3:35	Motivation and Introduction to ggplot2	00-ggplot-intro.R 00-ggplot-intro.Rmd
	ggplot2 basics: layers, geoms, facets, and coordinates	01-ggplot-basics.R 01-ggplot-basics.Rmd
3:35 – 3:45	Short Break

3:45 – 4:30	Perception and Visualization	02-perception.R 02-perception.Rmd MovieSummary.csv

Learning outcomes

After the end of the this one course, we expect you to be able to do the following:

Visualize data in the ggplot2 package: do basic plots, as well as know about the layer system, and be able to structure complex graphics
Take a dataset and use static graphics to look for interesting features.
Know about some aspects of human perception and what to avoid when plotting data.

Getting Ready on your own machine

You can bring your own laptop and work on it, if you like to. In order to keep up with everybody else, we're asking that you start installing the following pieces of software ahead of coming to the workshop:

Install R (from www.r-project.org)
It is recommended that you install the latest version of RStudio (from www.rstudio.org)