📊 R for Artists

What you will learn

  • Fundamental R programming skills
  • Statistical concepts and how to apply them in practice
  • Gain experience with the tidyverse, including data visualization with ggplot and data wrangling with dplyr
  • Finding Data on the Web, and creating your own datasets
  • Making Maps with tmap and mapview
  • Plotting Networks with tidygraph

Abstract

Data, Domains, and Metaphors

We will understand the idea of data and types of variables in data. These will lead us to creating different kinds of graphs based on variable type, using R. We will look at diverse domains, such as Geography, Networks and Education and plot geometric visuals based on the data we find in these domains. This will help us not only appreciate the data but give us a view of the underlying realities and ideas in each of these domains.

Using R in RStudio as an Integrated Development Environment is a crucial part of this journey. As is the paradigm of tidy data and the tidyverse method of programming in R.

Textbooks

We will be drawing material from a wide variety of sources for this course; as such, there is no single, required text book per se.

Our exposition will draw upon Robert Kabacoff’s book on Data Visualization, and on Hadley Wickham and Garett Grolemund’s R for Data Science. This latter book is an excellent choice for a personally owned hardcopy book on R!

We will also use material from tutorials published by prominent members of the #rstats community, such as those by Thomas Lin Perdersen (author of the tidygraph package) for Networks; Martijn Tennekes ( creator of tmap package) for Map-making; Daniel Kallin (creator of the nomnoml package); and Rich Iannone (creator of the DiagrammeR package ) for the Diagrams.

References

  1. Jack Dougherty and Ilya Ilyankou, Hands-On Data Visualization: Interactive Storytelling from Spreadsheets to Code, https://handsondataviz.org/. Available free Online.

  2. Claus O. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization, https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/. Available free Online.

  3. Jonathan Schwabish, *Better Data Visualizations: A Guide for Scholars, Researchers, and Wonks, Columbia University Press, 2021.

  4. Alberto Cairo, The Functional Art:An introduction to information graphics and visualization, New Riders. 2013. ISBN-9780133041361.

  5. Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling With Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals, Wiley 2015. ISBN-9781119002253.

Quick Lookup

Charts and Data

  1. Data Vis Project https://datavizproject.com/ Allows you to match data types and data-vis types!! Perfect!!

  2. Data Viz Catalogue https://datavizcatalogue.com/ Another good place to look for graphs that match your data!

  3. From Data-to-Viz https://www.data-to-viz.com/#explore

  4. Financial Times Visual Vocabulary Chart. A great chart to match data to data-viz. PDF here and Web version https://ft-interactive.github.io/visual-vocabulary/

  5. 72 types of Visualization for Data Stories https://blog.gramener.com/types-of-data-visualization-for-data-stories/

Charting in R

  1. R Charts https://r-charts.com/

  2. R Graph Gallery https://r-graph-gallery.com/index.html

Dataset Resources

  1. A wide variety of graphics and datasets on global issues at Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/

  2. Datasets at calmcode.io https://calmcode.io/datasets.html. Simple datasets that you should begin with.

  3. Data.World https://data.world. A very well organized easily searchable database of datasets and visualizations!

  4. The Harvard Dataverse https://dataverse.harvard.edu/. A very large searchable database of datasets on a very wode set of topics.

  5. IPUMS https://www.ipums.org/ Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) is the world’s largest individual-level population database. IPUMS consists of microdata samples from United States (IPUMS-USA) and international (IPUMS-International) census records, as well as data from U.S. and international surveys. Data provided is integrated across time and space.Health, Economics, Higher Education, Historical Data and much more

  6. Kaggle Datasets https://www.kaggle.com/datasets E.g. Netflix Shows

  7. Data Is Plural https://www.data-is-plural.com/. This a weekly newsletter of useful/curious datasets by Jeremy Singer-Vine.

  8. Information is Beautiful https://informationisbeautiful.net/ David McCandless' terrific information visualization site. All datasets used here are also available for download.

  9. India Data by Sector https://data.gov.in/sector

  10. The FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (very US-centric) https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home

  11. Datasets at 538 ( very US-centric) https://data.fivethirtyeight.com/

  12. Open Data Network ( again very US-centric) https://www.opendatanetwork.com/

  13. 311-data.org https://www.311-data.org/. Data about 311 calls in different parts of the US. (#311 is a complaints service that deals with non-crime / non-emergency related neighbourhood issues in the US)

  14. Google Dataset Search https://datasetsearch.research.google.com/

  15. Github dataset search https://github.com/search?q=datasets

  16. World Inequality Database, https://wid.world/. Global data on income and wealth inequality. India specific data also available.

  17. World Bank Open Data https://data.worldbank.org/. A global collection of economic development data .

  18. Jonathan Schwabish’s PolicyViz DataViz Catalogue. https://policyviz.com/resources/policyviz-data-visualization-catalog/ This is a spreadsheet that has links to data and images of visualizations that have been achieved with each of the datasets. Over 800 entries…see table below! (US centric, but very inspirational visualizations!), See the emebedded version below:

Our Tools

Chart Creation and Export

  1. Orange Data Mining https://orangedatamining.com/ Free software. Very intuitive, point-and-click, goes all the way from simple data-viz to ML!

  2. Datawrapper Academy https://academy.datawrapper.de/ A free browser-based tool, requires registration and login.

  3. RAWGraphs https://app.rawgraphs.io/ Another Free browser-based tool, no registration, no login. Simple interface too.

Story Telling with Charts

  1. Flourish Studio https://flourish.studio/ Beautiful and easy data visualization and storytelling

  2. Infogram https://infogram.com/ Create engaging infographics and reports in minutes

  3. Visme https://www.visme.co/ Yet another…

Last updated on Jan 7, 2024