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dataviz (12)

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Articles

Welcome to my blog! Its original title, “pars pas les mains vides!” which translates as “don’t leave empty-handed!”, conveys what I’m aiming to do: capture things I’ve picked up along the way in the weird and wonderful worlds of #rstats, data science and dataviz, and share them with others who may find them useful for their own adventures.

Feel free to pinch the best bits and reuse them for your own purposes - that’s what these articles are here for! And if you want to say thanks or hello, get in touch!

More than pretty graphs: Tips, tricks and resources to elevate your dataviz

Dataviz

Data Storytelling

A 45-minute tool-agnostic dataviz workshop, exploring how we can make the most of data visualisations to tell compelling stories with context

Level up your plots - Shiny in Production 2024 Edition

Dataviz

Data Storytelling

A 3-hour in person code-along workshop, exploring how we can make the most of colours, text, styling annotations, and interactivity to create compelling data visualisations

Ah, Ha, Ha, Ha, Parameterise!

Dataviz

Coding tips

Parameterise

RMedicine 2024 talk where I create and refine a parameterised plot function, with an exploration of how this approach can contribute to flexible and reproducible data-to-viz workflows across the team.

Ready, Steady, Viz! Tips, tricks and no-code resources for stand-out data visualisations

Dataviz

Data Storytelling

Inaugural talk on for the Black in Psych 2024 Summer Series | 12 resources, and many tips besides for creating compelling and memorable visualisations

From alright to all ready to publish

Dataviz

Coding tips

Advanced dataviz talk for RGlasgow, exploring how we can visualise rainfall in Glasgow and Edinburgh

Ah, ha, ha, ha, Parameterise!

Dataviz

Parameterised plot

Coding tips

A workshop on creating parameterised plot functions, which allowed us to create plots with different data, different variables, and different styling, all from one function.

Parameterising a multi-part plot

Data visualisation

Parameterised plots

Today’s #rstats exercise in building parameterised plots is brought to you by my desire to avoid copy-pasting and making minor edits to 200+ lines of code in order to create two variants of a set of interactive graphs for a client. I decided to blog my way through the process to highlight a few tips and tricks I’ve picked up along the way.

“So much more than pretty graphs”: Recent adventures in automating dataviz solutions

The Data Lab Community - Women in Data and AI Meetup | I talked about dataviz design systems, parameterised plots and WebR, before enjoying a talk by Martina Pugliese, and joining her for a fireside chat with Ally Orr, to discuss how we ended up here and what we’re excited about.

A quick experiment with WebR: how much can I do in under an hour?

dataviz

formatting

numbers

I got a leaflet through my door the other day with a bar graph that just didn’t look right. It inspired me to create a tool to easily create a bar graph online, so that people can do a quick side-by-side comparison. I’ve been wanting an excuse to give WebR a go, and this seems like a good place to start, so I thought I’d live blog my way through my first hour of playing with WebR. Ready, get set, go!

Formatting numbers for easy readability in R

dataviz

formatting

numbers

Sometimes you want a raw number. Other times, you want a number that you can instantly verbalise. This post explores an easy solution for getting from “1234567890” to “1,234.6M” without installing any additional packages.

Getting fonts to work in R

dataviz

typography

how-to

Getting fonts to work in R and RStudio can be tricky! This post walks through the different steps we need to follow to give ourselves the best chance of success.

Ten tips for better text: Typography meets ggplot and friends

RLadies Rome | A code-along workshop

Dynamic annotations: 10 tips for better text

Shiny in Production 2023 Keynote | Ten tips for better text in dataviz, using data from the Great British Bake Off

So much more than pretty graphs: The value of creating and implementing a dataviz design system in R

NHS-R 2023 Conference | Online talk

Level Up Your Plots: Using colour, annotations, text hiearchy and other tricks to make your data story stand out

NHS-R 2023 Conference | Online code-along workshop

Building a Dataviz Design System for a Medical Research Project

RMedicine 2023 | Lightening talk

Level up your plots: Using colour, text hierarchy and annotations to create compelling and memorable data visualisations

RMedicine 2023 | A code-along workshop

R-Ladies Edinburgh | Level up your plots

An in-person code along workshop exploring how to make good use of colour and text hierarchy in our plots and their annotations

Using colour and annotations for effective storytelling

Workshops for Ukraine | A 2-hour code-along workshop

Beautifully Annotated: Enhancing your ggplots with Text

R-Ladies Cambridge | Inaugural lunchtime dataviz meetup

Palatable Palettes: Five tips for creating and applying bespoke colour schemes

NHS-R Community Conference | Five tips for making good use of colours in your ggplots

Variations on a ggtheme: Applying a unifying aesthetic to your plots

NHS-R Community Conference | Three reasons why you should apply a bespoke ggplot theme to your plots & how to do that

Level Up Your Plots: A Code-along Workshop

Online Workshop @ NHS-R 2022 Conference - November, 2022

Crafting a data-driven fundraising campaign

Breaking down the process involved in creating a data-driven fundraising campaign for Origin Scotland.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Level Up Your Plots: Enhance the story telling capabilities of your datavisualisations

RUG @ HDSI - September, 2022

It was an absolute pleasure discussing these design tips and coding tricks with the Harvard Data Science Initiative R User group. I particularly enjoyed the Q&A at the end…

Automating sentences with R

text manipulation

Automating text in R, and making the output look human.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Align your axes

Applying a few formatting tricks and a custom function to make sure the x axes line up nicely across different plots.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Level Up Your Labels: Tips and Tricks for Annotating Plots

user!2022 - Poster and Elevator Pitch

Credit where it’s due: changing the canonical URL of a post

distill

A quick change in the YAML header to keep the search engines happy.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

How to make data viz that matches your organisation’s branding

design

ggplot

Picking a colour scheme that ties in with a client’s brand or that evokes the subject matter behind the data is what allows datavisualisations to contribute to, rather than detract from, the main story the client is seeking to tell. This post covers both the design steps and the coding steps involved in creating bespoke colour schemes.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

New year, new laptop, new library location, new version of R!

updating R

Eek? Starting again wasn’t nearly as painful as it used to be, thanks to {installr} and the generosity of people posting solutions online.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Setting up a generative art project using #rstats and GitHub Actions

generative art

github actions

For the last wee while, I’d been wanting to explore the fascinating field of Generative Art and add a continuous deployment project to my portfolio. Enter the @aRtfulBot, a Twitter bot I created to explore both of these at once!

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Alignment cheatsheet

dataviz

ggplot

annotations

I’ve used {ggtext}’s geom_textbox() a lot in my recent data visualisations, but, every time, I end up resorting to a bit of trial and error to get the alignment just right. Time to create a cheatsheet that will be useful to my future self, and hopefully to a few others also.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Welcome to Pars pas les mains vides!

Welcome to my blog! Its title, which translates as “don’t leave empty-handed”, conveys what I’m aiming to do: capture things I’ve picked up along the way in the weird and wonderful worlds of #rstats, datascience and dataviz, and share them with others who may find them useful for their own adventures.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

A Shiny App to make text sing

shinyApp

storytelling

I built a quick Shiny App to help users apply Gary Provost’s writing advice.

DuBois Challenge: Recreating his innovative spiral graph, and animating it!

dataviz

dubois

gganimate

Revisiting DuBois’ data visualisation was a masterclass in innovative techniques for creating compelling visualisations which push the boundaries of “normal” visualisations while being intuitive to their intended audience.

Arists, their lifespans, and their most productive times

dataviz

data art

storytelling

Creating storytelling data art about artists - how meta.

Visualising the rise of the use of mobile phones

dataviz

tidyTuesday

annotations

Another #TidyTuesday contribution, reminiscing about the old Nokias.

Visualising crop proportions - treemaps and line graphs give a different impression!

dataviz

patchwork

treemap

ggimage

visual perception

Catching up with #TidyTuesday data after prioritising a few other things. Having grown up in La Beauce I couldn’t not do this one.

Turning a 16th century theological data visualisation into an interactive network graph

dataviz

interactive

visNetwork

This hierarchical graph looked too structured to the people talking about it. So I reworked it into something a bit more organic…

Visualising trends of chattiness and IMDB ratings in Avatar: The last airbender

dataviz

ggplot2

storytelling

tidyverse

tidyTuesday

polar plot

cowplot

Using ggplot to combine traditional plots, polar bargraphs and images in a data visualisation to tell a story about a group of more or less chatty characters

Machine learning, penguins and explanatory data visualisations

dataviz

annotations

machine learning

ggplot2

tidyverse

tidyTuesday

An annotated data visualisation to illustrate the decision-tree model classification of penguins into species based on their flipper and bill lengths

A map-based data visualisation with dancing emojis

dataviz

ggplot2

The feral pigs caught my eye in the Brisbane dataset, and then things got rather silly.