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A quick introduction to ggplot2

by Karthik Ram. Average Reading Time: less than a minute.

My friend Jonah asked me to guest lecture in his R seminar aimed at grad students and postdocs in Integrative Biology. I gave Jonah a bunch of topic options ranging from reproducible research with R to data manipulation. The consensus was data visualization so I put together a 2 hour talk/hands on presentation for ggplot2 beginners. Here are my slides and code in case anyone else might benefit from it.

What worked

  • People got a good sense of what’s possible with ggplot2 even if they couldn’t keep up with the examples.
  • The code worked for most attendees except for a few glitches (see below).

What didn’t work

  • Several people still had very old copies of R or outdated copies of ggplot dependencies (which made their upgrade a little less intuitive).
  • Sourcing code/data from GitHub using devtools source_url doesn’t seem to work on Windows machines. I can’t replicate the problem without access to one but I might have to work out a better way to share data.

Slides are on Speakerdeck and the full repository is on GitHub. Please feel free to reuse, remix, or contribute to this presentation.

2 comments on ‘A quick introduction to ggplot2’

  1. Michael Bach says:

    Although I’m using ggplot for over a year now, there were some very helpful ideas for me, thank you!

  2. Chris Meaney says:

    Really nice intro to ggplot()!! Great work!!

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