R graphics with ggplot2
June 9, 2015, 2272 Gilman
Eric Hare, erichare@iastate.edu.
Andee Kaplan, ajkaplan@iastate.edu.
Carson Sievert, sievert@iastate.edu.
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. It will be held in a computer lab but 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.Registration:
Sign-up is done through EventBrite.Lectures and timetable
| Date | Notes | Lecture and Resources |
|---|---|---|
| 9:00 - 9:30 | Setting Up | This will make sure that everybody's system is up and running
00-setup.R |
| 9:30 - 11:00 | Look at that! | basic plots in the qplot framework: scatterplots, boxplots, histograms, barcharts and more, some aesthetics: color, shape, ... GraphicsIntro.R, Your Turn Solutions, ggplot2 cheat sheet |
| 11:00 - 12:00 | Mapping data | Making maps using ggplot2 02-PlotMaps.R, Your Turn Solutions, states.health.stats.csv, states.sex.stats.csv, states.stats.csv |
| 12:00 - 1:00 | Lunch Break | |
| 1:00 - 2:30 | Layers of Graphics | More detailed look at the ggplot2 package: layers, geoms 03-layers.R, Your Turn Solutions, noaa.rdata, animal.csv |
| 2:30 - 3:30 | What do we see? | Discussion of faceting and cognitive aspects of human perception 05-perception.R, movies dataset, Your Turn Solutions, |
| 3:30 - 3:45 | Break | |
| 3:45 - 4:45 | Polishing your plots | Finishing touches: options, themes 06-polishing.R |
| 4:45 - 5:00 | Feedback | We very much appreciate any feedback you can give us. You can find a form here: survey. |
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 (version 3.2.0) (from www.r-project.org)
- Once R is installed, start the application by double-clicking the icon. Copy and paste the following commands into the R Console Window:
packages <- c("ggplot2", "productplots", "GGally", "gridExtra", "maps","ggmap", "mapproj") install.packages(packages) library(ggplot2) library(productplots) library(GGally) library(maps) library(ggmap) library(animation) # Interesting way to do this all at once: # sapply(packages, library, character.only = TRUE) today() qplot(rnorm(100), rnorm(100), colour=factor(rbinom(100, 1, 0.5))) qplot(rnorm(100), rnorm(100), colour=rbinom(100, 5, 0.2))
