David Keyes
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a tutorial on making beautiful maps to print, a book on the fundamentals of telling stories with data, and examples of how to automate data quality checks. Let’s dive in!
Making Circular Maps in ggplot
I love when people use R to make things in real life. That’s exactly what Meghan Harris did last year, when she created a map for her best friend’s wedding. In this blog post, she goes step-by-step through the code, showing how she made the map. If you want to make a similar map, this is a great tutorial!
Telling Stories with Data
This book, written by Rohan Alexander, does what it says on the tin: shows how to tell stories with data. It balances practical application (it’s got R code) with larger picture considerations of how to tell stories with data (and the ethics of doing so). There’s a free online version and a hard copy available for purchase.
Four ways to write assertion checks in R
Your analysis is only is good as the quality of your data. It’s a truism you’ve probably heard before. How do you ensure that your data is high quality? There are many answers to this, but one important thing you can do as an R user is write code that can detect when your data doesn’t match your expectations. I’ve used this strategy to, for example, write code to ensure that data for the Oregon by the Numbers report I work on every year includes observations for all of the state’s 36 counties. Being able to use code to check your data is a marked improvement on manually checking it, and in this blog post by Danielle Navarro, you’ll learn four ways to write so-called assertion checks.
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Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below!
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