@JennyBryan posted her slides from the 2015 R Summit and they are a must-read for instructors and even general stats/R-folk. She’s one of the foremost experts in R+GitHub and her personal and class workflows provide solid patterns worth emulation. One thing she has mentioned a few times—and ...

@briandconnelly (of pushoverr fame) made a super-cool post about connecting R to @IFTTT via IFTTT’s “Maker” channel. The IFTTT Maker interface to receive events is fairly straightforward and Brian’s code worked flawlessly, so it was easy to tweak a bit and wrap into a package. To get started, ...

I set aside a small bit of time to give rbokeh a try and figured I’d share a small bit of code that shows how to make the “same” chart in both ggplot2 and rbokeh. What is Bokeh/rbokeh? rbokeh is an htmlwidget wrapper for the Bokeh visualization library ...

School of Data had a recent post how to copy “every item” from a multi-page list. While their post did provide a neat hack, their “words of warning” are definitely missing some items and the overall methodology can be improved upon with some basic R scripting. First, the technique they ...

On the news, today, of the early stages of drought hitting the U.S. northeast states I decided to springboard off of yesterday’s post and show a more practical use of hexbin state maps than the built-in (and still purpose unknown to me) “bees” data. The U.S. Drought ...

There’s been lots of buzz about “statebin” maps of late. A recent tweet by @andrewxhill referencing work by @dannydb pointed to a nice shapefile that ends up being a really great way to handle statebin maps (and I feel like a fool for not considering it for a more ...

Over on The DO Loop, @RickWicklin does a nice job visualizing the causes of airline crashes in SAS using a mosaic plot. More often than not, I find mosaic plots can be a bit difficult to grok, but Rick’s use was spot on and I believe it shows the ...

It seems Ruben C. Arslan had the waffle idea about the same time I did. Apart from some extra spiffy XKCD-like styling, one other thing his waffling routines allowed for was using FontAwesome icons. When you use an icon vs a block, you are really making a basic version of ...

Vis expert Naomi Robbins did an excellent critique of the graphics that went along with an article on Israeli election in the Jerusalem Post. Non-uniform and color-blind-unfriendly categorical colors and disproportionate arc sizes are definitely three substantial issues in that series of visualizations. We can rectify all of them with ...

My disdain for pie charts is fairly well-known, but I do concede that there are times one needs to communicate parts of a whole graphically verses using just words or a table. When that need arises, I’m partial to “waffle charts” or “square pie charts”. @eagereyes did a great ...

I’ve been seeing an uptick in static US “lower 48″ maps with “meh” projections this year, possibly caused by a flood of new folks resolving to learn R but using pretty old documentation or tutorials. I’ve also been seeing an uptick in folks needing to geocode US city/state ...