In a previous post we offered some solid supportive resources for learning R – a healthy dinner with lots of great vegetables. Here we offer a dessert cart of rich resources for data visualization and graphing. It’s a powerful motivation for using R.
First up is The New R Graph Gallery – extensive, useful, and actually new. “It contains more than 200 data visualizations categorized by type, along with the R code that created them. You can browse the gallery by types of chart (boxplots, maps, histograms, interactive charts, 3-D charts, etc), or search the chart descriptions. Once you’ve found a chart you like, you can admire it in the gallery (and interact with it, if possible), and also find the R code which you can adapt for your own use. Some entries even include mini-tutorials describing how the chart was made.” (Description by Revolutions.)
Sometimes we want (or need) plain vanilla – something clean and elegant rather than extravagant. Check out A Compendium of Clean Graphs in R, including code. Many examples are especially well-suited for the spartan challenge of conveying information in grayscale. The R Graph Catalog is a similar resource.
If you’re just getting started with R, take a look at the Painless Data Visualization section (p. 17 onward) in this downloadable Beginner’s Guide.
In R, ggplot2, based on the Grammar of Graphics, is perhaps the single most popular R package for data visualization. The R Cookbook‘s section on Graphs using ggplot2 is a helpful precursor to the R Graphics Cookbook. DataCamp’s DataVis with ggplot2 has a free segment of intro lessons.
For more on visualization and other capabilities, check out this recommended list of useful R packages in the R Studio support blog – succinct and terrific.
If you’re already skilled in R and want a new challenge, an indirect method of harnessing some of the power of D3.js for interactive web visualizations is available through plotly for R. Here’s getting started with plotly and ggplot2, plotly and Shiny, and a gallery. The resources offer code and in some cases the chance to open a visualization and modify its data.
Have a favorite resource? Please share as a comment, or email us!
Coral Reef Science & Cyberinfrastructure Network 