Chapter 2 of Data Visualization walks you through setting up an R Project, and takes advantage of R Studio’s support for RMarkdown templates. That is, once you’ve created your project in R Studio, can choose File > New File > R Markdown, like this:

And then choose “From Template” on the left side of the dialog box that pops up, and select the “Data Visualization Notes” option on the right:

Unfortunately, this option isn’t showing up for some users, I think due to a bug in one of the libraries used to install the socviz package. While that’s getting sorted out (hopefully soon), there’s also an alternative and very quick way to get a project and notes files up and running. From the console, first make sure the socviz package is loaded:

library(socviz)

Then, do this:

setup_course_notes()

This will copy and unzip a folder to your Desktop containing an R project with a set of Rmarkdown files that are ready to be used to take notes with. You’ll get a message that looks something like this:

Copied dataviz_course_notes.zip to /Users/kjhealy/Desktop and expanded it into /Users/kjhealy/Desktop/dataviz_course_notes

Your user name will most likely be different, and the destination shown may be different also depending on what kind of computer you are using.

Once it has been created, you can navigate to that dataviz_course_notes folder and open it. Inside will be a dataviz folder that looks like this:

Double-click on the dataviz.Rproj file and you should be good to go.