Overview

• Identify the importance of graphics in communicating information
• Define the layered grammar of graphics
• Demonstrate how to use layered grammar of graphics to build Minard’s graph of Napoleon’s invasion of Russia
• Practice generating layered graphics using ggplot2

Before class

• Read chapters 1-4 from R for Data Science
  • Chapters 1, 2, and 4 are very short but set the stage for the next few weeks
  • Chapter 3 is crucial - you need to read this chapter and complete some of the exercises before coming to class. Exercise solutions can be found here.
• Read The grammar of graphics
  • If you have additional time, also read/skim A Layered Grammar of Graphics
• Install and setup software
  • Definitely have R and RStudio installed and operational for class today
  • If you haven’t gotten GitHub setup yet, that’s fine but you will need it to complete homework 1

Slides and class materials

• Slides
• Why visualize data?
• How to build a complicated, layered graphic

• Practice generating layered graphics using ggplot2

• Exploring Minard’s 1812 plot with ggplot2 - a much fancier (and more complex) version

Additional resources

What you need to do

• Register your GitHub username for the course - all remaining homework assignments will be in private repositories. Private repos can only be seen and edited by members of our course organization. Once you register your GitHub account, I will invite you to join the course organization. If you don’t register your account, you won’t have access to any of the homework assignments.
• Complete homework 1
• Install the rcfss library from GitHub. To install the package, run the command devtools::install_github("uc-cfss/rcfss") in the console. We will be using data from this package in class next week.

If you do not already have the devtools library installed, you will get an error. Go back and install this first using install.packages("devtools"), then run devtools::install_github("uc-cfss/rcfss") in the console.