Always look on the bright side of plots

Everyone who creates visualizations in R is bound to make mistakes that prevent their plots from looking as they should. Sometimes, these mistakes create beautiful "accidental aRt", though other times they're just plain frustrating. Either way, however, there's something to be learned. This talk will draw on years of watching both the ggplot2 issue tracker and the @accidental__aRt twitter account to highlight some common plot foibles and explain what they can teach us about how ggplot2 works.

Transcript

1. @kara_woo rstudio::global(2021) always look on the bright side of plots
2. (clockwise from top le ft ): miles mcbain, alex hanna, noam ross, julia silge, jacqueline nolis, jarvis miller @accidental__aRt
3. sarah kilian
4. the prac ti cal dev, cc-by-nc 2.0
7. created with danielle navarro’s fl ametree package
8. mapping mishaps
9. aesthetics map visual properties to variables in your data
10. data from the palmerpenguins package by allison horst, alison hill, & kristen gorman
11. penguin_plot + geom_text( aes(x = 195, y = 55, label = "Chinstrap") )
14. library("ggrepel") penguin_plot + geom_text_repel( aes(x = 195, y = 55, label = "Chinstrap") )
16. we’ve written “Chinstrap” 
 `r nrow(penguins)` times
17. we’ve written “Chinstrap” 344 times
18. penguin_plot + geom_text( aes(x = 195, y = 55, label = "Chinstrap") )
19. penguin_plot + annotate( geom = "text", x = 195, y = 55, label = "Chinstrap" )
23. scale snafus
24. scales convert values from the data space to the aesthetic space
25. coordinate systems draw axes and panels
27. penguin_plot + scale_x_continuous(limits = c(200, NA)) penguin_plot + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(200, NA))
30. scale transformation occurs before statistical summaries
31. setting coordinate limits zooms in the plot
33. penguin_plot + scale_x_continuous(limits = c(200, NA)) penguin_plot + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(200, NA))
34. penguin_plot + scale_x_continuous(limits = c(200, NA)) #> Warning: Removed 192 rows containing non- finite values (stat_smooth). #> Warning: Removed 192 rows containing missing values (geom_point). penguin_plot + coord_cartesian(xlim = c(200, NA)) ⚠
35. theme threats
36. themes customize the look and feel of your plots
37. text
39. text └── axis.text
41. text └── axis.text └── axis.text.x │ │ └── axis.text.y
42. text └── axis.text └── axis.text.x │ └── axis.text.x.bottom │ └── axis.text.x.top └── axis.text.y └── axis.text.y.left └── axis.text.y.right
44. penguin_plot + theme( axis.text.y = element_text( angle = 90, hjust = 1 ) )
46. 🤔
47. theme_grey #> function (…) #> { #> … #> axis.text.y = element_text(margin = margin(r = 0.8 * half_line/2), hjust = 1), #> axis.text.y.right = element_text(margin = margin(l = 0.8 * half_line/2), hjust = 0), #> … #> }
48. the most specific theme element wins
49. penguin_plot + theme( axis.text.y.left = element_text( angle = 90, hjust = 1 ), axis.text.y.right = element_text( angle = 90, hjust = 1 ) )
52. mapping mishaps
53. mapping mishaps scale snafus
54. mapping mishaps scale snafus theme threats
55. chapter 13: mastering the grammar ggplot2-book.org
56. ggplot(states, aes(x = long, y = lat)) + geom_polygon() + coord_map()
57. rstd.io/global2021/karawoo