Publications by is.R()

Make your own electoral map

07.11.2012

You’ve already seen everyone else’s electoral map (see this amazing array of maps from 2008), how would you like to make your own? Today’s Gist allows you to do just that — input (manually!) state-by-state results, and output a beautiful choropleth map of presidential election results! This code, of course, can be used for any number of s...

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Five Thirty-Hate?

08.11.2012

The last few days have been trying, mostly because folks keep asking me the same questions: have you voted? Who do you think will win the election? Do you think Nate Silver (http://fivethirtyeight.blogs.nytimes.com/)  is right? How confident are you in the forecasts at _________ (fill in your favorite election forecast site)? For example: http:/...

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Interactive color picker, using locator()

09.11.2012

I mostly wrote this just to see how locator() works, and ended up making an HCL color picker, so you can make your own visually offensive rainbow color palettes! Or, you can make your own nice color palettes. It is up to you. Essentially, this script generates a fair number of color points in HCL space, allows you to click on them in any sequenc...

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Can’t a plot catch a break(s)?

13.11.2012

This post continues with the theme of how to modify plots from within ggplot; today we will specifically looking at custom axis breaks. Plots later in the week will examine the commands to change text in the plot area. The various other shortcomings of this plot will be discussed in future posts. To create custom breaks on the Y-axis: https://gis...

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Textual Healing

14.11.2012

While I know there are several awesome guides for how to make fine-tuning adjustments to plot labels/axes/ticks/text in ggplot, this is still the most common question I get from people new to ggplot: how do I change the size/font/color/position of (some text element)? Here are some examples.  First, let’s load the made-up data from yesterday....

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Textual Healing Part II

15.11.2012

Yesterday’s post showed a number of quick coding options for changing text in a basic ggplot. Here’s another two tricks for fine-tuning faceted plots. Again, let’s load our made up data about tooth growth (a real dataset in R, ToothGrowth, has the real data if you’re interested). As usual, we begin with creating our dataset: https://gist....

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Hjust and Vjust

16.11.2012

So, when you’re setting the position of text in ggplot, you may have to use the hjust and vjust commands. Depending on your demands, and if you don’t understand what they’re doing, they might seem hard to use. I found one script that produces the graph below, as well as an excellent discussion here: http://goo.gl/TaUsG I have modified the c...

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Gathering RealClearPolitics Polling Trends with XML

19.11.2012

Now that the election is over, you may want to use polling data in a model of the campaign. Simon Jackman has thoughtfully made his daily state-by-state predictions available for download, but a commonly-used dataset is the RealClearPolitics polling average. As you can see when you go to RCP, they have a nice HTML5 graph (screenshot above), over ...

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Representing density in two dimensions

21.11.2012

I’ll be subbing today for Chris, as we continue to explore some ggplot2 basics. Today, imagine that you have data distributed in two dimensions, and that you would like to convey differences in point density over space. As with many things, this is fairly easy to do with ggplot2, but it’s not quite as straightforward as it relies on the use o...

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Happy Thanksgiving from is.R()!

22.11.2012

Today’s post is mostly to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving. We will be taking the rest of the week off, and will return on Monday. Below is some code to reproduce the adorable Turkey above; enjoy! https://gist.github.com/4122464 Related To leave a comment for the author, please follow the link and comment on their blog: is.R(). R-blogger...

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