Easy Visualization in R

Course Format

Workshop with a very brief background and plenty of hands-on practice.

Contents

R is a widely used, freely available software environment for statistical computing and graphics. While R might be somewhat daunting to the beginner, recent advancements and developments allow creating beautiful visualizations/graphs even for those with minimal experience of R-programming. In particular, the package “ggplot2” allows the user to create high-quality, publishable graphs with little effort. This course is for anyone who wants to learn how to make good graphs.

Topics:

• Why are graphs/visualizations important?
• The “grammar of graphics” and ggplot2
• How to make different types of visualizations
• How to tweak the aesthetics of your graph
• Making the graph you have in mind

Remarks

You will get most out of this course, if you have data that you want to visualize in a particular way. Part of the workshop will be dedicated to working on your own data.

The software that we use for this course is free and platform-independent. You will benefit most when you will use a computer/account that can you can use again in the future. Thus, either work through your UWP-account on a University computer (computers with relevant software will be available), or bring your own laptop with R and RStudio downloaded and installed.

Trainer: Gert Stulp (GMW-Sociologie)

Prerequisites

There are no prerequisites, but some experience with data and making graphs (in any program) is useful.