Resources
If you happen to come across other resources that you find useful, please let us know and we’ll add them to the list.
Package links
Working with MIDFIELD research data
Using R
Atrebas (2019) for doing identical tasks in the data.table and dplyr environments. Very useful if you are familiar with dplyr syntax and want to translate that familiar functionality to data.table syntax.
Dowle & Srinivasan (2022) for the data.table website with vignettes by the package authors
Holtz (2018) for a gallery of chart designs possible with ggplot2.
R-bloggers, a searchable aggregator of R blogs.
Stackoverflow Searchable, public platform for coding questions and answers. For R-specific Q&A, add
[r]
as a search tag. Additional search tags such as[ggplot2]
or[data.table]
will help narrow your searches involving these packages.RStudio (2022) Links to downloadable help summaries (cheat sheets) for ggplot2 and many other packages. For data.table scroll down to the “Contributed cheatsheets” section.
Zumel & Mount (2020) for data science work with a very good chapter on data manipulation that performs every step three ways: a base R solution, a data.table solution, and a dplyr solution.
Data visualization
Books
Cairo (2019) for a data journalist’s approach to avoiding lying to an audience (and to one’s self).
Cleveland (1993) for a detailed look at matching chart design to the types of variables.
Robbins (2013) for a detailed development of principles and practices for creating effective charts, based largely on Cleveland’s work.
Tufte (1983) One of the best developments of aligning one’s visual rhetoric to one’s verbal rhetoric.
Wainer (1997) Often humorous in presenting do’s and dont’s of data display
Wainer (2014) Using evidence and visualization to improve healthcare.
Blogs
Evergreen (2023) Intentional reporting and data visualization
Few (2021) Visual business intelligence
Knaflic (2023) Storytelling with data
Layton (2023) for Richard’s blog in which several articles illustrate redesigning a published chart in an engineering education article to better align the logic of a display with the logic of the argument.