Welcome

This is the course website for the course “Making Your Research Accessible” at the GIGA German Institute of Global and Area Studies, 14-15 June 2018.

Course Description and Objectives

This course aims to enable participants to produce high-quality plots based on raw data and/or model outputs using the R package “ggplot2” (1st day) and to teach principles of interactive data visualization with the R package “shiny” (2nd day).

The first day will familiarize participants with the logic of the ggplot package and apply those principles to common use cases. In addition to some generic examples, such as scatterplots with/without regression lines, boxplots, or line charts, these use cases will be largely driven by participants’ needs and requests. Possible topics include grouped plots, faceting (i.e. dividing your data into many categories and plot them individually for comparison), or visualizing regression model output (e.g. through “dot-whisker” plots). Participants will learn through hand-on exercises to build their own plots and learn how to export plots in various formats.

The second day will revolve around the main steps involved in creating interactive web applications using R and Shiny Apps. During this day, participants will learn how to prepare data for building interactive graphics, the basic principles for crafting interactive apps and the main alternatives to deploy and share visualizations. After a brief introductory part, this session will be mostly practical. Participants will learn to create generic apps, as well as their own particular visualizations based on participants’ datasets and examples.

This course is NOT an introduction into principles of good data visualization as pioneered e.g. by Edward Tufte, but a hands-on course on the technical process of how to generate plots with ggplot2. For further resources on these topics, see below.

Instructors

Felix Haaß is a Reasearch Fellow at the GIGA Institute of African Affairs. Pau Palop García is a Research Fellow at the GIGA Institute of Latin American Studies.

Requirements

The class does not assume prior knowledge of R, but expects some familiarity with other statistical software packages, such as Stata or SPSS. The class expects that all participants will have a working installation of R, RStudio, and the “tidyverse” packages (installation instructions can be found here). Any prior exposure to R will be an asset.

Please bring a laptop with a working internet connection to the course as we will complete hands-on exercises throughout the day.

How to use this website

1. You should start by reading and following the software and installation guide.
2. The “Session” drop down menu at the top of this page will provide links to the individual sessions, the presentation slides, exercises, and R code solutions.
3. The help page in the upper right corner provides useful links and further resources on ggplot2 and principles of good data visualization.

Schedule

First Day (Felix Haaß)

Second Day (Pau Palop Garcia)