What’s New in R: April 29, 2024
Welcome to this week’s edition of What’s New in R! This week, we’re featuring a tutorial on making a beautiful snow cover map, a walkthrough of approaches to making custom arrows in ggplot, and some food for thought on making your data analysis even more reproducible than it probably is today. Let’s dive in!
Origin and development of a Snowflake Map
We may be moving out of snow season, but if you’re down to explore a map showing snow cover in the United States, this blog post is for you! In it, United States Geological Survey data visualization specialist Althea Archer details the process of making this beautiful map. From sketching out the idea to analyzing the data to visualizing it, this blog post will definitely teach you something new!
Making a custom arrowhead for ggplot2 using {ggarrow} and {arrowheadr}
If you’ve ever added arrows to your plots in ggplot, you know that there are a few options you can use. W. Joel Schneider wasn’t pleased with the defaults and wanted to make his own. In this blog post, he details how he did just this. In it, he highlights Teun van den Brand’s {ggarrow} package before showing how he made his own package called {arrowheadr} with even more arrows. If you’ve ever wanted to use arrows that look like candle flames, this is for you!
Patterns and anti-patterns of data analysis reuse
Warning: this blog post by Miles McBain is definitely for the more advanced users out there. In the blog post, Miles talks about common patterns people employ in order to reuse code across projects, and the pitfalls each entails (namely, that you make a change in one place but because you’ve copied code to other places, you then need to manually update it there as well). In the end, he argues for creating packages that have commonly-used functions. It’s a compelling argument!
If you enjoyed this issue of What’s New In R, please share it with a friend! And if they want to get What’s New in R directly in their inbox, they can sign up on the R for the Rest of Us website.
Got any ideas for resources I should feature in future issues of What’s New in R? Leave a comment below.
Sign up for the newsletter
Get blog posts like this delivered straight to your inbox.
You need to be signed-in to comment on this post. Login.