Goals

Hello everyone! I was excited to learn more stuff about R, albeit I was a bit nervous considering all the stuff we learned was quite foreign to me. However, Dani teaches everything really well and I was able to follow along just fine.

My goals were to get through the dino exercise without referencing my notes, and to play around with data visualisation with new data.

Dino Exercise

I tried watching the videos in one sitting, but I was only able to watch up to Video 6 before I had to do something else. What this meant was I did not do the dino exercise until the day after.

This was a real test of my memory to see if I remembered anything from the previous day.

What I found was that I was able to remember everything rather well, and things came intuitively to me. I only consulted my notes once because I forgot what geom_point was.


library(tidyverse)

dino <- read_csv("data_dino.csv")
print(dino)

picture <- ggplot(data = dino) + 
  geom_point(mapping = aes(x = horizontal, y = vertical))

plot(picture)

And I was able to create the dino (yay!).

Forensic Data

I was initially going to use the forensic data to create a box plot with new variables, but I kept receiving an error that I did not know how to fix.

However, I tried the next day and I ended up getting it to work.

This is what I did:


picture <- ggplot(data = data_forensic) +
  geom_boxplot(
    mapping = aes(x = band, y = est, fill = band)) +
  facet_wrap(vars(us)) +
  theme_light(
  ) +
  scale_x_discrete(
    name = NULL,
    labels = NULL
  ) +
  scale_y_continuous(
    name = "ESTIMATE"
  ) +
  ggtitle(
    label = "US vs non-US Forensic Scientists",
    subtitle = "Source: Martire et al."
  ) +
  scale_fill_viridis_d(
    alpha = .6,
    name = NULL
  )

plot(picture)

And this is what my box plot looked like:

Challenges

As aforementioned, R kept giving me an error that I could not fix with the variables I was using.

Then, I tried using the exact code that Dani used in the videos, but I still kept receiving the error.

I ended up restarting R studio and it ended up working! I am still not sure what caused the error though.

I was also unable to insert the R chunks properly because R kept saying that object “dino_data” and “forensic_data” were not found, so I kept getting errors. For that same reason, I could not get the output so I had to post pictures of my dino and boxplot instead.

Next Steps

I would like to understand why I am getting those errors, and get better at finding the solutions to those errors. I have been using Google, but sometimes it isn’t very helpful.

I would also like to be more confident about not depending on my notes for coding.