Resources & Further Reading
Here is a list of further resources.
Books (free online)
- Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. The book closest to this course: principles plus ggplot2 code, written for social scientists. The perceptual material in the Data Visualization section draws on Chapter 1.
- Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization. The best single reference on which chart to use and why; code-free, so it pairs well with Healy. Wilke also wrote the
colorblindrandcowplotpackages used in this course. - Hadley Wickham et al., ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. The grammar of graphics from its author; the reference once you’re past the basics.
- Hadley Wickham et al., R for Data Science. For the wrangling (
dplyr,tidyr) that comes before every good plot. - Rob Lovelace et al., Geocomputation with R . The standard reference for the spatial material in Applied Examples.
Books (print)
- Edward Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1983). The classic behind data-ink, chartjunk, and the truthfulness principles cited throughout this course.
- Alberto Cairo, How Charts Lie (2019) Chart literacy for consumers of graphs; excellent source of discussion examples.
- Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Storytelling with Data (2015). Annotation and presentation-oriented; complements the Annotation & Storytelling page.
- Jacques Bertin, Semiology of Graphics (1967). Where the idea of visual encoding channels began.
Key papers
- Cleveland & McGill (1985), Graphical Perception. The ranking of perceptual tasks underlying the “which chart” framework.
- Heer & Bostock (2010), Crowdsourcing Graphical Perception. The replication.
- Padilla, Kay & Hullman (2021), Uncertainty Visualization. Overview behind the Visualizing Uncertainty page.
- Franconeri et al. (2021), The Science of Visual Data Communication: What Works. A comprehensive, readable evidence review.
Reference sites
- From Data to Viz. Decision tree from data type to chart type, each with R code; the interactive version of the “which chart” poster.
- R Graph Gallery. Hundreds of charts with copy-paste ggplot2 code.
- ggplot2 cheat sheet
- Datawrapper blog. Lisa Charlotte Muth’s color guides are the best practical color texts on the web.
- Flowing Data
Inspiration
- The Fallen of World War II
- The Pudding. Visual essays
- Our World in Data
- Information is Beautiful Awards
- Sarah Leo, Mistakes, we’ve drawn a few. The Economist redesigning its own charts
- Gapminder project
Package index for this course
| Purpose | Packages |
|---|---|
| Core plotting | ggplot2, patchwork |
| Data wrangling | dplyr, tidyr, broom |
| Colors & themes | viridis, ggthemes, colorspace, colorblindr, cowplot |
| Annotation | ggrepel, gghighlight |
| Uncertainty | ggdist, ggeffects, marginaleffects, margins |
| Tables | gt, modelsummary |
| Interactive | plotly, ggiraph, gganimate, leaflet, mapview |
| Spatial | sf, terra, rnaturalearth, osmdata, blackmarbler, geodata, tidyterra |
| Export | ragg, svglite |
| Data | gapminder, vdemdata |