1  Introduction

These notes are based partly on Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction by Healy (2018). I created them for Denison students taking DPR 101: Data Visualization for Political Research. More than a mere reiteration of materials covered by Healy (2018), these notes go deeper in terms of examples, cover additional topics (like working with survey data), and introduce additional R packages (like {geomtextpath}). What’s more, these notes are a living document that I try to keep up-to-date on a regular basis. As aspects of working in R evolve (for example, the ability to use the base R pipe, |> in addition to the {magrittr} pipe, %>%), regular updates are not just helpful, they’re necessary.

These notes are meant to be read in the order they’re presented, but they can also act as a reference for specific topics as needed. Most chapters will be relevant for all R users, but aspects of the prerequisite chapters are specific to Denison students taking DPR 101 who have access to Denison’s R server version of RStudio (soon to be Posit Workbench). Beyond instructions necessary for accessing the server, all other topics and details covered should be relevant for those using local installations of R and RStudio on their personal computer.

There are many other helpful resources out there for working with R, both with respect to data visualization and other aspects of statistical programming. An excellent resource on both counts is R for Data Science (2e). I highly recommend using this as a resource.

Without further ado, let’s get to it!

Healy, Kieran. 2018. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton University Press.