June meeting: gganimate and Structural Equation Modelling with lavaan

As usual, our upcoming meeting will be open for all to attend, and newcomers / beginners are very welcome. Following the talks, we'll head on over to the nearby St. Andrews Brewing Co. pub - do join us!

Our first speaker is *Josh Bird*, policy researcher and analyst at the Scottish Funding Council. He will be telling us about:

# Telling data stories with gganimate: the GIFt that keeps on giving

Data is often only as useful as the insights it can reveal - and data visualisation plays a key role in this. This talk will focus on telling stories with data using gganimate, a package which extends the utility of ggplot2. I’ll provide examples of the many ways in which gganimate’s new grammar classes customise plot objects, and how these dynamic charts and graphs can be used to communicate important data messages to your intended audiences.

Our second speaker will be *Ugur Ozdemir*, Lecturer in Quantitative Political Science at The University of Edinburgh. Ugur will be sharing his experience on carrying out:

# Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) with lavaan

SEM is commonly in the social sciences because of its ability to study complex causal dynamics between unobserved constructs (latent variables) and observed variables. In this talk, I will be talking about structural equation models and their estimation using the lavaan package. I will use real world examples from the political behaviour literature.