Growing up in Australia, for me a carbonated drink like Pepsi or Fanta or lemonade was always just a "soft drink". (Also, 'lemonade' in Australia was something different to 'lemonade' in the US; it's something close to 7-Up.) So when I moved to Seattle, it was surprising to me that ... [Read more...]

Got some great reactions to the Napa Valley wine tasting map made with the ggmap package I posted on Monday. A couple of people asked if similar maps could be made for other wine regions (like Australia's Hunter Valley, or the Walla Walla region in Washington): provided you have a ... [Read more...]

Lets go one with the second part of learning R by doing R (you will find the first part here. As we have used vectors, matrices and loops in the first part, we will concentrate on graphics in this one. but first we will need data to plot: Sometimes you ... [Read more...]

R has had a maps package available since the very early days. It's great for simple geographic maps, but the political boundaries can be out of date. For more detailed maps, you can also download shape files and use the sp package to draw borders directly. But for accurate and ... [Read more...]

In this series of three posts, we’ll look at colours in R graphics produced with ggplot2: what are the available choices of colour schemes, and how to choose a colour palette most suitable for a particular graphic? In kindergarten, choosing a co... [Read more...]

In conjunction with Facebook's record-setting IPO last Thursday, the New York Times created an infographic to put the size of the offer in context with other recent IPOs. A detail of the graphic as it appeared in the print edition appears below: ChartsNThings gives a fascinating peek into the weeklong ... [Read more...]

As widely reported by CNN, the Huffington Post, Talking Points Memo, the sophistication of speeches by US politicians has declined in recent years, dropping from an 11th-grade level in 2005 to a 10th-grade level today. The reports are based on an analysis by the Sunlight Foundation, based on textual analysis of ... [Read more...]

If you want to get a quick numerical summary of a data set, the summary function gives a nice overview for data frames: __ require(ggplot2) Loading required package: ggplot2 __ data(diamonds) __ summary(diamonds) carat cut color clarity depth table Min. :0.2000 Fair : 1610 D: 6775 SI1 :13065 Min. :43.00 Min. :43.00 1st Qu.:0.4000 Good : 4906 E: 9797 VS2 :12258 1... [Read more...]

Next week I’ll present a glimpse of R and ggplot2 graphics at VUW. This is a MESA seminar on ‘Data analysis and plotting with free and open source tools’ where we’ll present spreadsheet alternatives based on gnuplot, Python, an... [Read more...]

Kevin Quealy, graphics editor at the New York Times, has published another fascinating behind-the-scenes look at how the Times creates data visualizations for print and online. In his latest post, he looks at how a visualization of the Yankee's Mariano Rivera performance compared to other Major League Baseball pitchers was ... [Read more...]

As anyone who's ever played Civilization[*] knows, the advent of sailboats capable of crossing the oceans leads to an explosion of exploration, commerce and social development. And with the visualization below, you can see that explosion in action: Ben Schmidt used the R language and data recorded in by hand ... [Read more...]

With print() If you are an advanced R user, you probably know the lattice and the ggplot2 packages. They allow you to plot elegant graphics with less code (Hocking, 2009 and Sueur, 2010). If you know these two packages, you should hardly use plot() for your graphs. If you read my article ... [Read more...]

That's a mouthful! I presented this topic to a group of Vandy statisticians a few days ago. My notes (essentially reproduced in this post) are recorded at the Dept. of Biostatistics wiki: HowToBootstrapCorrelatedData. The presentation covers some bootstrap strategies for hierarchically structured (correlated) data, but focuses on the multi-stage bootstrap; ... [Read more...]

The image below isn't a bearskin rug in the shape of the USA. It's fact, it's a visualization of the wind flowing over the United States, as of 4PM EDT today, March 30. You can click through to see the current wind conditions, based on latest data from the National Digital ... [Read more...]

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If the goal of the Invisible Children campaign, which has received millions of dollars of contributions since the Kony 2012 video went viral, is to convince us that the money is being put to humanitarian efforts, they could do a lot better than this chart: Putting 37% of expenses into programs in ... [Read more...]

For those who have not read the seminal works of Tufte and Cleveland, please hang your heads in shame. To salvage some sense of self-worth, you can then head over to Solomon Messing’s blog where he is starting a series on data visualization based on ... [Read more...]

Hadley Wickham has just released an update to the ggplot2 graphics package for R. Version 0.9.0 significantly speeds up the process of rendering graphics, and the documentation is much improved (including the addition of many new examples). This update also adds a bunch of new features, which are documented in this 40... [Read more...]

Spanish R user and solar energy lecturer Oscar Perpiñán Lamigueiro has written a detailed three-part guide to creating beautiful maps and choropleths (maps color-coded with regional data) using the R language. Motivated by the desire to recreate this graphic from the New York Times, Oscar describes how he creates ... [Read more...]

Stats Chat is an interesting kiwi site—managed by the Department of Statistics of the University of Auckland—that centers around the use and presentation of statistics in the media. This week there was an interesting discussion on one of those infographics … Continue reading → [Read more...]