Ruì Qiū

April 2, 2021

不画饼周报 #8

项目


观点

Over the course of our work together (supported by many people at Stamen) he (Paul Ekman) told me that he never managed to get any of his papers published in a scientific journal without having them rejected at least fifteen times. Here’s his advice:

  1. Leave no stone unturned
  2. Never take no for an answer (although, to be clear, in many cases no definitely means no; he means when you’re going after something in a professional, consensual environment)
  3. Always aim higher than you can see Lastly: especially in the beginning, say yes to any opportunity you have to present your work publicly. Put as much energy as you possibly can into these presentations. It’ll be terrifying at first. Do it anyway.
Since the 1970s at least, data visualization has been governed by a vague consensus—an orthodoxy—that prioritizes bare clarity over playfulness, simplicity over allegedly-gratuitous adornments, supposed objectivity over individual expression. As a consequence, generations of visualization designers grew up in an era of stern and often pious sobriety that sadly degenerated sometimes into the dismissive self-righteousness of popular slurs such as ‘chart junk’. … Nadieh Bremer and Shirley Wu are wondrous eccentrics. Their splendid book is the product of a collaborative experimental project, DataSketch.es, that might be one of the first exponents of an emerging visualization orthodoxy in which uniqueness is paramount and templates and conventions are seen with skepticism.

故事


工具

  • Using React with D3.js (wattenberger.com)
  • ggplot Wizardry: My Favorite Tricks and Secrets for Beautiful Plots in R (cedricscherer.com) Dr. Cédric Scherer 3月份的一个幻灯片讲稿，介绍了一些在使用 {ggplot2} 及其他 {gg-} 系列时的技巧。页数比较多，涉及到的图也比较多，但是讲得很细致。例如：
    • seq(10, 100, by = 10) 可以用 1:10 * 10 的简写方式；
    • 用 theme_set() 来控制全局主题，之后由 ggplot() 生成的图都会遵循这其中的规范；
    • 用 theme_update() 来更新上述设定；
    • 如果是有一系列的可视化需要处理，风格的连贯性可以增加项目的可重现性，例如 BBC Visual and Data Journalism cookbook for R graphics;
    • 强烈推荐了 #tidytuesday project (github.com) 这个每周一举行一次的线上学习群体（不知道这么称呼准确不准确）；
    • {ggtext}: improved text rendering support
      • element_markdown() markdown syntax for elements like title, caption
      • geom_richtext() rotational text labels
      • element_textbox(), element_textbox_simple() text boxes with word wrapping
      • geom_textbox()
      • custom element_textbox_highlight()
    • {glue}: glue strings to data in R
    • {ggforce}: provide missing functionality to ggplot2
      • geom_bspline_closed() creates closed b-spline curves as shapes
      • geom_mark_*() advanced labels for single or multiple points, also show groups or highlight interesting parts (fancy annotations!)
    • {ggdist}: visualizations of distributions and uncertainty (this is the special missing piece I was looking for!)
    • {gggibbous}: moon charts for ggplot2 (it’s like pie charts, but more elegant!)
    • {ggstream}: streamgraphs
  • 其他一些关于 {ggplot2} 的操作：
    • theme(plot.title.position = 'plot') -> left-aligned title
    • theme(plot.caption.position = 'plot' -> right-aligned caption
    • theme(legend.position = 'top') -> legend on top
    • guide(color = guide_colorbar(title.position = 'top', title.hjust = .5, barwidth = unit(20, 'lines'), barheight = unit(.5, 'lines'))) -> slimmer legend
    • coord_cartesian(expand = FALSE) -> limit expansion (put the graphs in center)
    • coord_cartesian(clip = 'off') -> turn off the coordinates clipping feature for anything out of the coordinates
    • theme(plot.margin = margin(x, y, z, m)) -> customized margins (otherwise, by default would be base_size/2)
    • annotation_custom(img, ymin, ymax, xmin, xmax) -> add an image, the image is created by either magick::iomage_read() or grid::rasterGrob()
    • {patchwork}: combine and arrange ggplots together with simple syntax
  • Interactive data tables for R • reactable (glin.github.io) 作者 Greg Lin 写的文档和例子做的尤其好。
  • Say Goodbye to “Good Taste” · Data Imaginist (data-imaginist.com) {ggfx} 可以给图增加滤镜了。

播客


书籍