98th ESA Annual Meeting (August 4 -- 9, 2013)

August 03 - 09, 2013

WK 5

Data Visualization Using R

The R programming language is one of the most widely used tools for statistical analysis in the academic community. In addition to its large and ever-expanding suite of analytical tools, R is capable of producing publication quality figures that can easily be embedded into publications, presentations, and lab notebooks. In addition to its core functionality, the ability to do sophisticated visualization in R is enhanced by supplemental packages, most notably the ggplot2 library. In this workshop we move beyond basic plotting and highlight some of the more powerful approaches for visualization in R, focusing in particular on the functionality represented by the ggplot2 library (and associated packages). We will explain the 'grammar of graphics' that ggplot2 uses to build graphs and figures of all types. This workshop will also cover the use of the plyr and reshape2 packages, which are incredibly useful tools to format datasets before plotting and/or analysis. We will provide some example datasets beforehand but feel free to bring your own along with your laptop and a pre-installed copy of R and RStudio (available free online for all platforms at rstudio.com) to participate. All data files and code for this workshop will be made publicly available on github.com, so participants as well as those unable to attend will have access to them as a resource.