You’ve already seen everyone else’s electoral map (see this amazing array of maps from 2008), how would you like to make your own? Today’s Gist allows you to do just that — input (manually!) state-by-state results, and output a... [Read more...]

I really enjoy using the DW-NOMINATE data for examples, as I do here. Sometimes it’s useful to indicate regions in the background of a plot — perhaps two-dimensional regions of interest, perhaps one-dimensional periods in time. It’s... [Read more...]

Whenever possible, I try to save R graphic output in a vector format, typically pdf(). I also like to use the handy ggsave() function to do so, as it streamlines the process, and makes it easy to be consistent across formats. However, at times it is n... [Read more...]

I only rarely have the occasion to need the convex hull of a set of points, but I love chull(), so I’d like to share an example of how to use it. This Gist also offers a pretty straightforward application of the Split-Apply-Combine strategy (see... [Read more...]

I don’t really care for the name “marimekko” or “mosaic,” but I do like this type of plot as a means of illustrating proportions in nested categorical data, or as an alternative to the parallel time series plots discussed... [Read more...]

In developing plots, I often use color (or “colour” in ggplot2 parlance) to reflect values of a third, non-X/Y, variable. Depending on the distribution of this Z variable, however, the effective color range can be narrow, making it difficul... [Read more...]

Featuring the lovely “spectral” palette from Colorbrewer. This really just serves as a reminder of how to do four things I frequently want to do: Make a heatmap of some kind of matrix, often a square correlation matrix Reorder a factor vari... [Read more...]

pie( table( whence.i.tweet )) qplot( whence ) + coord_polar() pie( log( table( whence )))+RColorBrewer ggplot (see below) plot( density( tweets.len )) qplot(... stat="density") + geom_density qplot(...stat="bin") + geom_text(...) tweeple tweep... [Read more...]

[Read more...]

Background: In some cases it is necessary to conduct the same analysis multiple times on either the same or different data. In such circumstances it is worth writing a function to simplify the code. In this example the location quotient provides a simple calculation easily written in to a function. ... [Read more...]

This is an updated version of my Making Maps with R tutorial. I think the code is lot simpler and it also includes some data for you to play around with. Background: Spatial data are becoming increasingly common, as are the tools available in R to process it. Of course ... [Read more...]