Maëlle's R blog

Showcase of my (mostly R) work/fun

Hundreds of Guardian blind dates

One of my more or less guilty pleasures is reading The Guardian blind date each week. I think I started doing this when living in Cambridge, England for five months. I would buy i every weekday and The Guardian week-end every week-end. I wasn’t even dating at the time I discovered The Guardian blind dates but I’ve always liked their format.

I get so much into each date report that seeing both participants say they want to meet again makes me ridiculously happy. I like wondering how matches were made, but today I just want to look into the contents of post-date interviews.

Bar bar plots but not Babar plots

You might have heard of the “bar bar plots” movement whose goal is to prevent using (let’s use ggplot2 language shall we) geom_bar when you could have used e.g. geom_boxplot or geom_histogram because the bar plot hides the variability of the distributions you say you’re comparing, even if you add some sort of error bar. I whole-heartedly agree with this movement but in this post I’d like to present some ok bar plots, that represent counts of individuals in different categories. You might know them as geom_bar(blabla, stat = "identity") or geom_col. They’re still bar plots and they’re great, in particular when you make puns out of them which is what I did with Miles McBain.

A plot against the CatterPlots complot

In these terrible times, we R people have more important subjects to debate/care about than ggplot2 vs. base R graphics (isn’t even worth discussing anyway, ggplot2 is clearly the best alternative). Or so I thought until I saw CatterPlots trending on Twitter this week and even being featured on Revolutions blog. It was cool because plots with cats are cool, but looking more closely at the syntax of CatterPlots, I couldn’t but realize it was probably a complot to make us all like base R graphics syntax again! So let me show you how to make a cute plot with the awesome ggplot2 extension emojifont.