kitsch plot

I was fascinated by this xkcd comic about where to live based on your temperature preferences. I also thought it’d be fun to try to make a similar one from my R session! Since I’m no meteorologist and was a bit unsure of how to define winter and summer, and of their relevance in countries like, say, India which has monsoon, I decided to focus on a single country located in one hemisphere only and big enough to offer some variety… the USA! So, dear American readers, where should you live based on your temperature preferences?

It was recently brought to my attention by Hannah Frick that there are now sooo many R-Ladies chapters around the world! R-Ladies is a world-wide organization to promote gender diversity in the R community, and I’m very grateful to be part of this community through which I met so many awesome ladies! Since we’re all connected, it has now happened quite a few times that R-Ladies gave talks at chapters outside of their hometowns. An R-Lady from Taiwan giving a talk in Madrid while on a trip in Europe and another one doing the same in Lisbon, an R-Lady from San Francisco presenting at the London and Barcelona chapters thanks to a conference on the continent, an R-Lady from Uruguay sharing her experience for the New York City and San Francisco chapters… It’s like rockstars tours!

Therefore we R-Ladies often joke about doing an exhaustive global tour. Hannah made me think about this tour again… If someone were to really visit all of the chapters, what would be the shortest itinerary? And could we do a cool gif with the results? These are the problems we solve here.

Emojis were again quite en vogue this week on Twitter with Romain François doing some awesome stuff for the emo package, in particular this teeny tiny animated clock. It reminded me of my own emoji animated clock that I had done a while ago for representing time-use data. Time for me to present its genesis!

In this post I am inspired by two tweets, mainly this one and also this one. Since the total number of articles every year is increasing, no matter which subject you choose, the curve representing number of articles as a function of year of publication will probably look exponential, so one should not use such graphs to impress readers. At least I’m not impressed, I’m more amused by such graphs now that there’s a hashtag for them.

I shall use an rOpenSci package for getting some data about number of articles about a query term, and to do a graph that’s not an evergreen review graph!

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.

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.

After the last post building on feedback from readers, the blog is back to the regular program of recycling old Github repos. Today’s project was waiting for its turn here and will involve a Catan card game. Nearly a year ago, I played Catan with my husband who was kind enough to accept our monitoring all rounds. My goal? Producing a nice animated visualization of our game.