Introduction to ggplot

An Introduction to ggplot for NHSr

Welcome

This is the course site for the Introduction to ggplot workshop created by Eugene Hickey for the NHS-R Community.

This six-hour hands-on workshop will be a gentle introduction to ggplot package as a tool to create impressive graphics and data visualisations.

• The Morning will discuss the overall structure of ggplot and we’ll start doing some initial plots; barcharts, boxplots, histograms, point/line plots…..

Thursday, January 21st
10-1pm BST (check your time zone)

• The Afternoon will cover colours, themes, facets, and fonts.

Thursday, January 21st
1-4pm BST (check your time zone)

This workshop is designed for people with previous experience of R but have yet to take the plunge to working with ggplot.

Prework

Essential

Hopefully most of what you need will be on this webpage. Our exercises can be done from within the slides themselves. But if you’d prefer to work on a local machine, then….

We’ll be using the software listed below.

• Install R and RStudio Desktop on your computer.

You can find step-by-step instructions for installing these here: macOS, Windows.

• Install the following packages:

# From CRAN
list_of_packages <- c("tidyverse", "ggthemes", "carData", 
                      "scales", "showtext", "wesanderson", 
                      "RColorBrewer", "viridis", "dslabs",
                      "gplots", "palmerpenguins",
                      "gapminder", "datasets", "HistData")

# run the following line of code to install the packages you currently do not have
new_pkgs <- list_of_pkgs[!(list_of_pkgs %in% installed.packages()[,"Package"])]
if(length(new_pkgs)) install.packages(new_pkgs)

# From GitHub
devtools::install_github("nhs-r-community/NHSRdatasets")

Links

• Link to this website:

Acknowledgments

This workshop draws from various sources, most notably the books by Kieran Healy and Claus Wilkie. I’d also like to mention the webpage of The Top 50 ggplot2 Visualisations. This workshop ran smoothly with the help of Sharon Townsend as co-pilot.

This website was made with the distill package. The content was created using xaringan by Yihui Xie, flair by Kelly Bodwin, learnr and xaringanExtra (both by Garrick Aden-Buie), and flipbookr by Gina Reynolds. And special thanks for a custom theme designed by Silvia Canelón.