Workshop - Introduction to ggplot2

This approximately three hour workshop gives an introduction the ggplot2 package for newcomers to the R. Participants are immediately taught to work with R markdown so that it becomes a natural part of their workflow.

Target Audience

This is a beginner level course aimed at anyone who works with data and has at least some basic knowledge of R, e.g., see:

• Getting Started in R

Running the Workshop

• Use the workshop presentation (HTML):
  • https://github.com/saghirb/ggplot2-Intro-Workshop/tree/master/Presentation
• Share the following zip file with the participants:
  • ggplot2-Intro.zip
  • Ask them to unzip it

Presentation and Exercises

The presentation is in three part with three accompanying sets of exercises as follows:

• Exercise 1: Portugal
• Exercise 2: Europe
• Exercise 3: Gapminder plot

Start by presenting the basic ggplot2 concepts using the HTML presentation referenced above. Before the participants start the first exercise show them how to use R markdown and go through the first part of "Exercise 1" with them, step by step.

When you get to each of the exercises in the presentation:

• Ask the participant to double click on Exercises/ggplot2-Exercises.Rproj from the unzipped location to open Rstudio with the right setup.
• Participants should then work through Exercises/ggplot2-Exercises.Rmd.
• Start by knitting the Rmd document.
  • As the start of the first Exercise ask the participants to change the name to their name and knit again. This usually makes them smile.

Note: Some participants might open the Exercises/ggplot2-Exercises.Rproj from within the zip archive which will lead to issues when knitting the Exercises/ggplot2-Exercises.Rmd. Double check that they unzipped the file first and opened Exercises/ggplot2-Exercises.Rproj from the unzipped location.

During the exercises strongly encourage participants to discuss and work together in pairs.

At the End of the Course

• Share the solutions to the exercises (zip file)
  • https://github.com/saghirb/ggplot2-Intro-Workshop/raw/master/Share/ggplot2-Solutions.zip

Re-creating the Workshop Materials.

Run the _make.R script in the R console.

Why ggplot2?

It produces elegant graphics by design. It is very flexible allowing you to customise your plots or add new features (via extensions) to the ggplot2 ecosystem (see https://www.ggplot2-exts.org/gallery/).

ggplot2 is an essential must have package your R tool kit. Be brave give it a go :)

For more information see https://ggplot2.tidyverse.org/

Workshops

First presented as part of a Data Science Unplugged meetup:

• https://www.meetup.com/Data-Science-Unplugged/events/260241067/

Annoucements

A reminder of annoucements for this repository.

• https://twitter.com/dsup_lx/status/1120346266704150528
• https://rweekly.org/2019-17.html#Resources

Acknowledgements - ggplot2

Thanks to Hadley Wickham (author and maintainer) and his co-authors Winston Chang, Lionel Henry, Thomas Lin Pedersen, Kohske Takahashi, Claus Wilke, Kara Woo and RStudio for this great package and many others too.

For a full list of contributors to the ggplot2 package see https://github.com/tidyverse/ggplot2/graphs/contributors.