Dataviz Course Packet Quickstart

[This article was first published on R on kieranhealy.org, and kindly contributed to R-bloggers]. (You can report issue about the content on this page here)
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

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:

R Studio menu

Select R Markdown …

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:

R Studio menu

Pick a Template

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:

R Studio menu

Contents of the course packet.

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

To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: R on kieranhealy.org.

R-bloggers.com offers daily e-mail updates about R news and tutorials about learning R and many other topics. Click here if you're looking to post or find an R/data-science job.
Want to share your content on R-bloggers? click here if you have a blog, or here if you don't.

Never miss an update!
Subscribe to R-bloggers to receive
e-mails with the latest R posts.
(You will not see this message again.)

Click here to close (This popup will not appear again)