Data Visualization Notes

This is a starter RMarkdown project template to accompany courses taught with Data Visualization. You can use it to take notes, write your code, and produce a good-looking, reproducible document that records the work you have done. At the very top of the file is a section of metadata, or information about what the file is and what it does. The metadata is delimited by three dashes at the start and another three at the end. You should change the title, author, and date to the values that suit you. Keep the output line as it is for now, however. Each line in the metadata has a structure. First the key (“title”, “author”, etc), then a colon, and then the value associated with the key.

This Document is an RMarkdown File

Markdown is a simple formatting syntax for authoring HTML, PDF, and MS Word documents. For more details on using R Markdown see http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com.

When you click the Knit button a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. A code chunk is a specially delimited section of the file. You can add one by moving the cursor to a blank line choosing Code > Insert Chunk from the RStudio menu. When you do, an empty chunk will appear in your file.

Code chunks are delimited by three backticks (found to the left of the 1 key on US and UK keyboards) at the start and end. The opening backticks also have a pair of braces and the letter r, to indicate what language the chunk is written in. You write your code inside the code chunks. Write your notes and other material around them, as here.

Load Libraries

To begin we must load some libraries we will be using. If we do not load them, R will not be able to find the functions contained in these libraries. The tidyverse includes ggplot and other tools. We also load the socviz and gapminder libraries.

Here, the braces at the start of the code chunk have some additional options set in them. There is the language, r, as before. This is required. Then there is the word setup, which is a label for your code chunk. Labels are useful to briefly say what the chunk does. Label names must be unique (no two chunks in the same document can have the same label) and cannot contain spaces. Then, after the comma, an option is set: include=FALSE. This tells R to run this code but not to include the output in the final document.

If you have not installed these required libraries yet, make sure you have an internet connection and install them now.

## To install these packages, change eval = FALSE to eval = TRUE 
## in the line above. You only need to do this once. Alternatively, 
## copy the code below and paste it into the Console window.

my_packages <- c("tidyverse", "broom", "coefplot", "drat",
                 "gapminder", "GGally", "ggforce", "ggrepel", "ggridges", 
                 "here", "margins", "maps", "mapproj", "mapdata", 
                 "MASS", "patchwork", "quantreg", "rlang", "scales", "sf", 
                 "socviz", "survey", "srvyr", "viridis", "viridisLite", 
                 "devtools")

install.packages(my_packages, repos = "http://cran.rstudio.com")

data_packages <- c("covdata", "congress", "kjhnet", "nycdogs")

drat::addRepo("kjhealy")
install.packages(data_packages)

When you click the Knit button in RStudio a document will be generated that includes both content as well as the output of any embedded R code chunks within the document. You can embed an R code chunk like this:

gapminder
## # A tibble: 1,704 × 6
##    country     continent  year lifeExp      pop gdpPercap
##    <fct>       <fct>     <int>   <dbl>    <int>     <dbl>
##  1 Afghanistan Asia       1952    28.8  8425333      779.
##  2 Afghanistan Asia       1957    30.3  9240934      821.
##  3 Afghanistan Asia       1962    32.0 10267083      853.
##  4 Afghanistan Asia       1967    34.0 11537966      836.
##  5 Afghanistan Asia       1972    36.1 13079460      740.
##  6 Afghanistan Asia       1977    38.4 14880372      786.
##  7 Afghanistan Asia       1982    39.9 12881816      978.
##  8 Afghanistan Asia       1987    40.8 13867957      852.
##  9 Afghanistan Asia       1992    41.7 16317921      649.
## 10 Afghanistan Asia       1997    41.8 22227415      635.
## # ℹ 1,694 more rows

The remainder of this document contains topic headings and an empty code chunk to get you started. Try knitting this document now by clicking the “Knit” button in the RStudio toolbar, or choosing File > Knit Document from the RStudio menu.

Why look at Data?