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Posts

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.

This is a mix of blog posts, “tweetorials” and LinkedIn posts I wrote as I was discovering fun things, and talks. It’s fully searchable through the search function in the nav bar.

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 hello, get in touch!

On-brand accessible dataviz

data-visualisation
r-how-to
dataviz-design-system

My contribution to the RSS panel on Accessibility at the 2025 RSS Conference in Edinburgh.

Sep 4, 2025

Visualise, Optimise, Parameterise!

data-visualisation
r-how-to
parameterised-plots
annotations

The penguins are back! And this time, it’s for a Beak-Off. They are organising themselves into teams to see which team can show off the biggest range of beak lengths. Retrace our steps in this code-along workshop where we built a graph, made it better (and interactive!), and optimised the parameterised plotting function to address all the judges’ requirements.

Jun 11, 2025

An interdisciplinary journey in data visualisation

data-visualisation
storytelling

Keynote talk at the Women in Data Science 2025 conference held at Heriot Watt University. An exploration of how I have ended up doing what I do, peppered with tips and resources for future dataviz projects.

May 28, 2025

Fixing awkward backgrounds in ggplot2

r-how-to
ggplot2

When creating graphs and maps with a fixed coordinate system (e.g. coord_sf() or coord_polar()), the background colour can end up not covering the entire export area. There are a few different ways of fixing the issue - one of which I think is more elegant than the others, involving a simple function which makes use of {cowplot}.

Mar 6, 2025
Cara Thompson

Optimising the use of colours for storytelling in a spaghetti plot

data-visualisation
storytelling
ggplot2

One of my clients recently asked me for tips on optimising spaghetti plots. Those plots with multiple trend lines all superimposed on top of one another, where it can often be very difficult to figure out what is what… They are an important part of the dataviz vocabulary in his field, so the mission was to figure out how to make the most of them!

Jan 23, 2025
Cara Thompson

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

data-visualisation
storytelling

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

Nov 18, 2024

Leveraging Shiny for creating high-end bespoke parameterised plots (without learning how to code)

parameterised-plots
data-visualisation
ggplot2

A behind-the-scenes look at an app I developed to allow a client who doesn’t code to create parameterised visualisations straight from his data.

Oct 9, 2024

Level up your plots - Shiny in Production 2024 Edition

r-how-to
data-visualisation
storytelling
annotations
ggplot2

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

Oct 8, 2024

Ah, Ha, Ha, Ha, Parameterise!

data-visualisation
r-how-to
parameterised-plots

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.

Jun 14, 2024

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

data-visualisation
storytelling

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

Jun 11, 2024

From alright to all ready to publish

data-visualisation
dataviz-design-system
annotations
r-how-to
ggplot2

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

May 23, 2024

Ah, ha, ha, ha, Parameterise!

data-visualisation
parameterised-plots
r-how-to

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.

Mar 28, 2024
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