In this course, participants will learn how to use the ggplot2 Project to make, format, label and adjust graphs using R. ggplot2 combines the advantages of base and lattice graphics while maintaining the ability to build up a plot step by step from multiple data sources. The ggplot2 Project, created by Hadley Wickham, is named after the term “Grammar of Graphics”, which was coined by Leland Wilkinson (creator of Systat) and won the 2006 John Chambers Award for Statistical Computing. This “grammar of graphics” is a system of describing and organizing the fundamental components of a graph and the process of creating a graph. Using ggplot2, participants will learn how to design and implement graphs in an efficient, elegant, and systematic manner, following principles of general good graphing practice.
Dr. Randall Pruim
Randall Pruim is chair of Mathematics and Statistics department at Calvin College as well as director of the Calvin€™s Integrated Science Research Institute (ISRI), which was founded in 2008 through a $1.1 million grant from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. The ISRI organizes a number of initiatives to deepen integrated approaches to science research and education. Initiatives of the ISRI have led to grants from the NSF to provide scholarships to students who will combine computation with one of the traditional sciences like biology, chemistry, or physics and to renovate laboratory space to create the Integrated Science Research Lab, which combines both wet and in silico lab facilities in a state-of-the-art research space for faculty and students. Dr. Pruim is also part of Project MOSAIC, an NSF-funded initiative to improve the teaching of modeling, statistics, calculus, and computation nationally. The mosaic R package, available on CRAN, is a product of Project MOSAIC that makes it easier to teach calculus and statistics using R.
