Making New York Times (or FT)-style figures with R and ##ggplot2

This event is postponed to 2/11 at 6:30 pm. Thank you.

Welcome to our R Meetup event focused on data visualization!

Have you ever wondered how journalists from NYT, FT, and BBC create visualizations that get millions of views or shares? Well, it's less mysterious than you might think.

Ref: Revolution Analytics, 2018. The Financial Times and BBC use R for publication graphics. https://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2018/06/ft-bbc-uses-r.html)

In this session, we'll dive into ggplot2, one of the most powerful and flexible tools available for creating visualizations in R. Whether you're exploring data, communicating results, or just wanting to make your plots look more polished, ggplot2 offers a grammar of graphics that allows you to layer different components of a plot to build complex visualizations from scratch. We'll walk through the basics of creating plots, customizing aesthetics, and making your data stories clear and compelling. Let's get started on transforming raw data into impactful visuals!

One friendly reminder: if you never heard about ggplot2, you may visit the free book "ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (3e)" hosted on the following website: https://ggplot2-book.org/. This book is by far one of the most popular data science books.

Our Meetup sessions are designed to be hands-on. The presentation will conclude with a live coding session using the #ggplot2 package. You can build your first awesome plot using R Studio and #ggplot2 and post it on a website. If time allows, we may also practice creating plots using R syntax/script generated with AI tools like ChatGPT.

No background in R or programming is required although a little bit of curiosity would help. No installation of anything is needed. This session will work for you as long as you have a stable internet connection.