Mosaic plots (aka treemaps) are a great way to visualize hierarchical data. A collection of rectangles represents all the elements to be visualized (customers, news items, blog posts), with the size and color of the rectangles coding attribute. But what makes this chart unique is the arrangement of the elements: ... [Read more...]

Last week we looked at an analysis done in R by the good folks at Offensive Politics, looking at the political climate surrounding the recent Senate election in Massachusetts. There were some very insightful comments (thanks, Revolutions readers!) about the design of the charts, especially in the choice of color ... [Read more...]

A lot of attention recently has gone to the more modern (and, dare I say, sexier) graphics systems in R, ggplot2 and lattice. But there's a lot of power in the base graphics system built into core R, especially when you want control over every aspect of how the graph ... [Read more...]

Here's an example I featured in my list of 7 Awesome Things about R (awesome thing #3: graphics and data visualization). The Learning R blog features a reproduction of a graphic that recently appeared on Flowing Data. It shows the colors in a box of Crayola crayons: before 1949 there were only 8, but ... [Read more...]

Every good artist needs a canvas, and when it comes to displaying geographic data placing those data in context -- on a map -- makes all the difference. A new package for R from Markus Loecher, RgoogleMaps, allows you to download a street or satellite map from Google simply by ... [Read more...]

FlowingData has just posted a nice step-by-step tutorial on how to make a heat-map in R, like this one on attributes of NBA scorers: If you want to take the concept a step further with time-series data, you can also create calendar heat-maps in R. For example, you can track ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham recently updated the ggplot2 package for R to version 0.8.5. In addition to bugfixes and performance improvements, this version introduces some handy new features. Among them: the ability to display mathematical equations as text, automatic legends for color scales, and user-configurable axis labels and legend titles. The Learning R ... [Read more...]

GEEK FIGHT!!! says JD Long on Twitter as the New York Times publishes a widely-reposted interactive graphic about Netflix rental data, and the Wall Street Journal also gets into the interactive-viz game with a graphic on bank bonuses. If it's a fight, it's a knockout in the first round, if ... [Read more...]

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Here's a neat visualization of the decline of the British, Spanish, Portugese and French empires from 1800 to present day. It's definitely more art than stats -- judging by the relative size of India and Australia I think the circles are scaled to area, not population -- but it definitely does ... [Read more...]

R has a lot of functions. Add in all the packages on CRAN, and then there's a lot of functions. You can search through the contents of the function documentation at places like Rseek.org, but the R Graphical Manual takes a different tack on exploring the functions in R: ... [Read more...]

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oday Romain Francois posted an interesting topic in the R-help list, and you can read his blog post for more details: celebrating R commit #50000. 50000 is certainly not a small number; we do owe R core members a big “thank you” for their great efforts in this fantastic statistical language in ... [Read more...]

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I pushed 3 more graphics from Biecek Przemyslaw to the graphics gallery A list of popular names for colors from packages RColorBrewer, colorRamps, grDevices A set of examples of few graphical low-level parameters lend, ljoin, xpd, adj, lege... [Read more...]

Przemyslaw Biecek has submitted this graph (and also others I will add later) to the graphics gallery A list of examples for the atomic functions polygon(), segments(), symbols(), arrows(), curve(), abline(), points(), lines(). this figure is t... [Read more...]

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