Week 8: Visualization with ggplot2

Reading

• John Theibault, “Visualizations and Historical Arguments,” in Writing History in the Digital Age, eds. Kristen Nawrotzki and Jack Dougherty (University of Michigan Press, 2013), https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv65sx57.19.
• Kieran Healy and James Moody, “Data Visualization in Sociology” Annual Review of Sociology, 40: 105–128.
• Hadley Wickham, Mine Çetinkaya-Rundel, and Garrett Grolemund, R for Data Science (2nd Edition): Chapters 1, 9, 10, and 11.
• Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2018), Chapters 1 and 3.

Assignment

• Think about the type of visualizations you would like to make for your research. How will they help to make a historical argument?

Activities

• Discussion of visualizations and historical arguments.
• Workshop: Visualization with ggplot2

Resources

• Hadley Wickham, Danielle Navarro, and Thomas Lin Pedersen, ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (3rd Edition).
• Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (Princeton University Press, 2018).
• Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (O’Reilly 2019).
• Cédric Scherer’s comprehensive blog post, A ggplot2 Tutorial for Beautiful Plotting in R is a great comprehensive guide to what is possible with ggplot2.
• Cédric Scherer’s workshop at RStudio 2022, Graphic Design with ggplot2 is a really good resource for building good looking plots with ggplot2.
• My notes on ggplot2 provide an overview of the main component of plotting with ggplot2.