Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism

Companion Web site for the book by Sharon Machlis

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Chapter 2: Get Started With R in a Few Easy Steps

Additional resources

Installation help. No matter how many step-by-step instructions a book includes, there may be times when software won’t install properly on someone’s computer. It’s simply not possible to anticipate every problem, whether conflicts with other installed programs or firewall/network difficulties.

If you’re having issues, you may want to try searching for similar error messages. You can start off with Google, but if that doesn’t work, try searching on the developers’ site Stack Overflow at stackoverflow.com – include the R language tag [r] in your search – or RStudio’s community https://community.rstudio.com.

If you need to post a question, give as many details as you can. For example, “I’m trying to install package X and it’s not working” doesn’t give readers any idea what’s going wrong. “I’m getting the following error message when trying to install package X with the code install.packages(“PackageX”) on my Windows 10 system running R version 3.4.4: “ along with the error message would be better.

Hopefully, though, you won’t need this kind of help at the outset of your R journey!

Chapter 3: See How Much You Can Do in a Few Lines of Code

Run a remote script to make an interactive map:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smach/R4JournalismBook/master/03_map.R

Bonus map: Mapping income data:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smach/R4JournalismBook/master/03_manhattan_income_map.R

Additional resources

Chapter 4: Import Data into R

Boston snowfall data:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smach/NICAR15data/master/BostonWinterSnowfalls.csv

Boston zip code file:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/smach/R4JournalismBook/master/data/bostonzips.txt

Additional resources

Import directly from a Google spreadsheet. The googlesheets package lets you import data from a Google Sheet, even if it’s private, by authenticating your Google account. The package is available on CRAN; install it with with install.packages("googlesheets"). After loading it with library("googlesheets"), read the excellent introductory vignette. At the time of this writing, the intro vignette was available within R at vignette("basic-usage", package="googlesheets"). If you don’t see it, try help(package="googlesheets") and click on the “User guides, package vignettes and other documentation” link for available vignettes, or look at the package information on GitHub at https://github.com/jennybc/googlesheets.

‘Scrape’ data from Web pages with the rvest package and SelectorGadget browser extension or JavaScript bookmarklet. SelectorGadget helps you discover the CSS elements of data you want to copy that are on an HTML page; then rvest uses R to find and save that data. This is not a technique for raw beginners, but once you’ve got some R experience under your belt, you may want to come back and re-visit this. I have some instructions and a video on how to do this at http://bit.ly/Rscraping. RStudio has a webinar available on demand as well, at https://www.rstudio.com/resources/webinars/extracting-data-from-the-web-part-2/ .

Chapter 5: Basic Data Exploration

Additional resources

The dataMaid package was designed to generate a printable PDF report for a data set. The report includes a statistical summary of a data frame by default, but it’s also possible to add information such as where the data came from. Just be warned that generating PDFs within R can be complicated to set up, especially on Windows, requiring versions of TeX/LaTeX and pandoc to be on your local system. dataMaid’s visualize() function doesn’t require PDF-creating capabilities, though. Blog post with more dataMaid details: http://sandsynligvis.dk/articles/18/codebook.html

The conflicted package will warn you if you try to use a function where there’s more than one function with the same name loaded in your working session. Find out more at https://github.com/r-lib/conflicted.

Added after final manuscript was sent to the printer

The DataExplorer R package will generate an HTML report about a data frame with a single line of code. Details: https://boxuancui.github.io/DataExplorer/.

Chapter 6: Beginning Data Visualization

Tian Zheng’s R Colors PDF
http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~tzheng/files/Rcolor.pdf

Additional resources

RStudio’s ggplot2 cheat sheet. Download the 2-page PDF at https://www.rstudio.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/11/ggplot2-cheatsheet-2.1.pdf.

Computerworld’s searchable, sortable table of ggplot2 commands. I wrote this to make it searchable by task instead of command. Find it at http://cwrld.us/ggplot2ChtSht (there’s also a link to some downloadable code snippets).

R Graph Catalog. A searchable catalog of different ggplot2 visualizations with downloadable sample code, maintained in part by RStudio’s Jenny Bryan. http://shinyapps.stat.ubc.ca/r-graph-catalog/. Another option is Top 50 ggplot2 Visualizations – The Master List (With Full R Code). And while these aren’t actually my top 50, you’ll find some more samples with R code to browse. From r-statistics.co. http://r-statistics.co/Top50-Ggplot2-Visualizations-MasterList-R-Code.html.

ggplot2 graphics companion. Some very nice examples of publication-quality visualizations by type, all with code. From Trafford Data Lab in Trafford, Greater Manchester, UK. http://www.trafforddatalab.io/graphics_companion/.

Base R graphics. Statistician and author Nathan Yau leans toward base R graphics. He did a comparison of base vs. ggplot2 for a number of data visualizations. Although written in March 2016, it should still be relevant: https://flowingdata.com/2016/03/22/comparing-ggplot2-and-r-base-graphics/.

Base R vs. ggplot2. Two advanced R users talk about their respective viewpoints on why base R or ggplot2 is preferable. Maybe you’ll be moved by one of their posts. See Why I don’t use ggplot2 by Jeff Leek at Johns Hopkins University http://simplystatistics.org/2016/02/11/why-i-dont-use-ggplot2/ and Why I use ggplot by Stack Overflow data scientist David Robinson at http://varianceexplained.org/r/why-I-use-ggplot2/.

Formula-based version of ggplot2. If you like ggplot2’s capabilities but find the syntax uncomfortable, the ggformula package on CRAN might be worth exploring. As the package vignette explains, it uses the syntax gf_plottype(formula, data = mydataframe). gf_plottype options are gf_point(), gf_line(), gf_bar(), gf_boxplot(), etc.; while the formula can be something like yvaluecol ~ xvaluecol. Install, load, and read the package vignette, vignette("ggformula",package = "ggformula").

esquisse RStudio add-in. This add-in offers a basic drag-and-drop interface for creating simple ggplot2 graphics, including generating and displaying the underlying R code. See more information at https://github.com/dreamRs/esquisse.

Added after final manuscript was sent to the printer

paletter. This package pulls together numerous other additional palettes for ggplot2 from dozens of other packages including dutchmasters, ggthemes, RolorBrewer, Redmonder, and viridis. Available on GitHub: https://github.com/EmilHvitfeldt/paletteer.

BBC Visual and Data Journalism Cookbook for R graphics. Includes samples, code, and an R package for creating “BBC-style graphics” with ggplot2. https://bbc.github.io/rcookbook/.

From Data to Viz. This site offers advice on what visualizations to use based on the type of data you have – one numeric, two numeric, one numeric and one categorical, etc. – and then gives you sample code and “common caveats you should avoid.” Extremely helpful for beginning and intermediate R users alike. https://www.data-to-viz.com/.

Chapter 7: Two or More Data Sets

Airport delay data schema
http://www.transtats.bts.gov/Fields.asp?table_id=236

Additional resources

R educator Charlotte Wickham (Hadley’s sister), who teaches statistics at Oregon State University, posted a tutorial on the purrr package at https://github.com/cwickham/purrr-tutorial. Also see an accompanying video from the 2017 RStudio user conference at https://www.rstudio.com/resources/videos/happy-r-users-purrr-tutorial/.

RStudio’s Jenny Bryan posted a Why purrr? explainer at https://jennybc.github.io/purrr-tutorial/bk01_base-functions.html.

Chapter 8: Analyze Data by Groups

Additional resources

For more on using dplyr’s join functions, see the two-table vignette with vignette(package = "dplyr", topic = "two-table"). dplyr’s introductory vignette has good additional explanations for summarize(), mutate(), and group_by(). See it with vignette(package = "dplyr", topic = "dplyr").

There are other ways to summarize by group. Base R has an aggregate() function, the doBy package was designed for statistical calculations by groups, and the data.table package is extremely powerful and fast. I’ve settled on dplyr for this type of work because I find the syntax intuitive. Many journalists agree.

Syntax, though, is a matter of personal preference. If you’d like to explore alternatives to dplyr, look at the aggregate() help page with ?aggregate, the doBy introductory vignette at https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/doBy/vignettes/doBy.pdf, or the yhat blog post about summary stats with data.table at http://blog.yhat.com/posts/fast-summary-statistics-with-data-dot-table.html.

Chapter 9: Graphing Data by Group

Additional resources

One example of a publication-quality graphic – with code – based on ggplot2 and geofacets: Bloomberg’s visualization of enrollment in Affordable Care Act health insurance marketplaces (with some touch-ups in Adobe Illustrator). https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/health-insurance-marketplaces-for-2018/

Len Kiefer, deputy chief economist at Freddie Mac, has done a lot of visualizing federal housing and economic data in R. He’s got some interesting ideas for faceting, such as a post on visualizing housing-price trends at http://lenkiefer.com/2017/05/18/state-hpa. Kiefer’s blog home page is lenkiefer.com.

Emil Hvitfeldt has been keeping a large list of available color palettes in R. That’s on GitHub at https://github.com/EmilHvitfeldt/r-color-palettes.

geofacet package author Ryan Hafen wrote a blog post explaining the advantages of this dataviz type; see it at http://ryanhafen.com/blog/geofacet. The package Web site is at https://hafen.github.io/geofacet/.

Chapter 10: Write Your Own R Functions

Hadley Wickham’s chapter on tests in his R Packages book: http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/tests.html

Data analyst Hillary Parker’s popular and easy-to-follow “Writing an R Package from Scratch”: https://hilaryparker.com/2014/04/29/writing-an-r-package-from-scratch/

Additional resources

Hadley Wickham and his sister Charlotte Wickham have an interactive video course on DataCamp about writing functions: https://www.datacamp.com/courses/writing-functions-in-r. The first part of the course is free, and covers a fair amount including scoping (understanding environments within and outside of a function). Access to the rest of the class requires a $29/month paid account.

Update: DataCamp has been embroiled in a controversy over how it has handled an executive’s ‘uninvited physical contact’ with an employee. The latest: DataCamp CEO steps down indefinitely in wake of ‘inappropriate behavior’

Hadley Wickham also has a free online book about how to create R packages, at http://r-pkgs.had.co.nz/.

For a quick look at code testing in action, see my screencast R tip: Test your code with testthat at https://www.infoworld.com/video/87735/r-tip-test-your-code-with-testthat. I also recorded a screencast showing how to use the case_when() function, at https://www.infoworld.com/video/87435/r-tip-learn-dplyr-s-case-when-function.

Finally, there are more compact ways to calculate “most recent Monday” than the examples I used in this chapter. This StackOverflow question has several options: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/32763491/find-most-recent-monday-for-a-dataframe.

Chapter 11: Maps in R

Request a free U.S. Census Bureau API key at [Request a free key at http://api.census.gov/data/key_signup.html.

U.S. Census Bureau TIGER shapefiles: https://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger-line.html.

tigris package’s GitHub repository: https://github.com/walkerke/tigris

More info about the tidycensus package: https://walkerke.github.io/tidycensus/

Compare US metropolitan area characteristics in R with tidycensus and tigris blog post: https://walkerke.github.io/2017/06/comparing-metros/

Markercluster plug-in info at the leaflet package Web site: https://rstudio.github.io/leaflet/markers.html. Some other good sources of shapefiles in addition to the U.S. Census Bureau:

Washington Post investigative reporting unit’s GitHub R code repository for a story about ahow Jared Kushner and his partners used a program meant for high-unemployment areas to build a luxury skyscraper in Jersey City, N.J. https://github.com/wpinvestigative/kushner_eb5_census.

Additional resources

For more examples of using the tidycensus package for U.S. Census data, try Julia Silge’s post, Using tidycensus and leaflet to map Census data https://juliasilge.com/blog/using-tidycensus/.

And for more on using tmap, I wrote a tutorial for Computerworld at https://www.computerworld.com/article/3038270/data-analytics/create-maps-in-r-in-10-fairly-easy-steps.html. Zev Ross posted one at http://zevross.com/blog/2018/10/02/creating-beautiful-demographic-maps-in-r-with-the-tidycensus-and-tmap-packages/. It includes the helpful tip that tm_shape() can re-project your data directly with the projection argument, such as tm_shape(my_sf, projection = “WGS84”). And, Thomas Lo Russo posted a nice how-to from a workshop he did with Max Grutter, https://tlorusso.github.io/geodata_workshop/tmap_package.

There are several other excellent mapping packages in R that you might want to investigate (I didn’t have space to demo them all):

ggplot2 added support for simple features in the CRAN version in 2018. For exploratory analysis, creating a choropleth map is as simple as ggplot(simpleFeaturesObject) + geom_sf(aes(fill = columnName)).

The choroplethr package, as the name implies, is designed to create choropleth maps. It was designed specifically to map U.S. Census data, but now handles importing shapefiles as well. http://www.arilamstein.com/open-source/. Creator Ari Lamstein demos animated choropleths at http://www.arilamstein.com/open-source/choroplethr/animated-choropleths/.

The plotly general data visualization R package also does mapping. You can see more info at https://plot.ly/r/choropleth-maps/. Package maintainer Carson Sievert blogged about using plotly for mapping with ggplot2 at https://blog.cpsievert.me/2018/01/30/learning-improving-ggplotly-geom-sf/ and with simple features at https://blog.cpsievert.me/2018/03/30/visualizing-geo-spatial-data-with-sf-and-plotly/.

ggmap For more on using ggmap with ggplot2, see the GitHub repo at https://github.com/dkahle/ggmap.

For an excellent example of geospatial analysis and housing prices, I’d suggest the Urban Spatial blog’s detailed examination of San Francisco Housing prices. It was done by Ken Steif, director of the Master of Urban Spatial Analysis program at the University of Pennsylvania, and then-Masters student Simon Kassel did a sophisticated analysis of San Francisco housing prices by neighborhood in R. http://urbanspatialanalysis.com/dataviz-tutorial-mapping-san-francisco-home-prices-using-r/

Len Kiefer, Deputy Chief Economist at Freddie Mac, does a lot with mapping economic and housing data on his blog, such as the collection at http://lenkiefer.com/2016/08/24/more-maps.

For technical details on mapping in general as well as in R:

Added after book was published

Chapter 12: Putting It All Together: R on Election Day

See more about the taucharts R package at http://rpubs.com/hrbrmstr/taucharts.

Find out more about the highcharter R package at jkunst.com/highcharter.

More information about the metricsgraphics R package is available at the package’s website, http://hrbrmstr.github.io/metricsgraphics/.

To see other interactive R packages, check out the HTML widgets gallery at http://gallery.htmlwidgets.org.

Additional resources

For analyzing and visualizing pre-election polling data in R, the pollstR package is an R client for the Huffington Post’s Pollster API. This source has mostly data on U.S. contests, although it occasionally includes data from other major elections worldwide, such as the 2017 France presidential race. https://github.com/rOpenGov/pollstR

Heat maps can be an interesting way to visualize changes in results over time. Peter Aldhous, a science reporter with BuzzFeed News and investigative reporting instructor at the University of California Santa Cruz, posted materials from his National Institute for Computer-Assisted Reporting training session that includes creating a heat map with ggplot2. http://paldhous.github.io/NICAR/2017/r-analysis.html

Interested in visualizing election results by party for a legislature such as the U.S. Senate or U.K. House of Commons? Check out the ggparliament package on GitHub at https://github.com/robwhickman/ggparliament

My guide to Election Night resources for the 2016 election includes a link to compare forecasts with results, and how to use the pollstR package to pull data from the Huffington Post’s Pollster API. http://www.computerworld.com/article/3139884/data-analytics/r-resources-for-election-night.html

Kan Nishida has a more stats-heavy example of using R to analyze election results, using techniques such as K-means clustering to see which California counties are most similar to each other based on 2016 election results. bit.ly/Rsimilarities.

After this book was published, Economist data journalist G. Elliott Morris released the politicaldata package for analyzing U.S. political data in R. It’s designed to make it “easier to explore polling, election results, demographic data and more,” according to an explainer Morris wrote in February, 2019. See it on GitHub: https://github.com/elliottmorris/politicaldata.

Chapter 13: Date Calculations

Inspiration

The Stanford Open Policing Project collects data from states throughout the U.S. on police traffic stops. The project posted a tutorial on analyzing Connecticut data with R, including use of lubridate and dplyr, at http://bit.ly/TrafficStopTutorial.

NY Times restaurant inspection interactive map:

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/dining/new-york-health-department-restaurant-ratings-map.html

Additional resources

Video lecture on dates in R by Dr. Roger Peng for a Coursera class bit.ly/RDatesTimes.

If you need to work with times alone, without dates attached, the tidyverse includes an hms package. See more at the package’s GitHub repo: https://github.com/tidyverse/hms.

Chapter 14: Help! My Data’s in the Wrong Format!

Additional resources

RStudio has a webinar on data wrangling at:

https://www.rstudio.com/resources/webinars/data-wrangling-with-r-and-rstudio/.

I published a video screencast with article and code, Reshape data in R with the tidyr package, at https://bit.ly/reshapetidyr.

Chapter 15: Integrate R With Your Storytelling Using R Markdown

Additional resources

RStudio’s R Markdown Web site at rmarkdown.rstudio.com has a lot of information about creating and customizing documents, notebooks, slide presentations, dashboards with RStudio’s flexdashboard package, and more.

For examples of all the things you can do with R Markdown, check out RStudio’s R Markdown gallery at http://rmarkdown.rstudio.com/gallery.html.

A video of Garret Grolemund’s hour-long webinar, Getting Started with R Markdown, is available at https://www.rstudio.com/resources/webinars/getting-started-with-r-markdown/.

Looking for some brief ideas of how to tweak an R Markdown doc? Check out Pimp my RMD: a few tips for R Markdown by data analyst Yan Holtz at https://holtzy.github.io/Pimp-my-rmd/.

The University of Edinburgh’s Coding Club posted an R Markdown tutorial on GitHub at https://ourcodingclub.github.io/2016/11/24/rmarkdown-1.html.

Chapter 16: Simple Web Scraping

Additional resources

The RStudio webinar “Data Science Case Study” with Mine Cetinkaya-Rundel includes some Web scraping of the La Quinta Web site to download their locations using SelectorGadget and rvest.

Why La Quinta? To analyze data from the Mitch Hedberg joke that “la Quinta is Spanish for ‘next to Denny’s’.” https://www.rstudio.com/resources/webinars/data-science-case-study/

Charlotte Wickham’s purrr tutorials are extremely useful, easy to follow, and packed with helpful tips. A video of her 90-minute presentation at the UseR! conference in Brussels is available at Microsoft’s Channel 9 https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conferences/useR-International-R-User-2017-Conference/Solving-iteration-problems-with-purrr (if you’ve got the paper version of this book, it might be easier to simply go to channel9.msdn.com and search for Solving iteration problems with purrr.)

An earlier version from the 2017 RStudio conference, without video but with step-by-step slides and code, is on GitHub at https://github.com/cwickham/purrr-tutorial

If you are a more advanced programmer and interested in using APIs with R, check out the httr package and httr quickstart guide vignette. In addition, Steph Locke has a short how-to at https://itsalocke.com/blog/r-quick-tip-microsoft-cognitive-services-text-analytics-api/.

Chapter 17: An R Project From Start to Finish

Additional resources

Gloria Lin and Jenny Bryan posted a regular expressions tutorial as part of a University of British Columbia Stats 545 course. It’s available online at http://stat545.com/block022_regular-expression.html.

The RegExplain RStudio addin features a regex cheat sheet reference and an interactive regular-expression builder that shows you text matches as you work. There’s a good explainer in the readme file at https://github.com/gadenbuie/regexplain/#readme. (For general regex-building without R-specific quirks, regex101.com is a useful site.)

Chapter 18: Additional Resources

More functions, packages and tools worth a look

datapasta - This package makes it easy to copy data into your clipboard and then generate R code to create a vector or data frame from that information. (Aside: What’s not to like about a GitHub repo that starts off “On top of spaghetti, all covered in cheese….”) See more from author Miles McBain at https://github.com/MilesMcBain/datapasta.

The RStudio addin Bare Combine lets you select a string of comma-separated characters such as New York, Boston, Chicago and turn them into a properly quoted R vector c("New York", "Boston", "Chicago"). This requires RStudio. “‘Bare Combine’ is going to change my life,” New York Times Ben Casselman tweeted after first reading about it (in my Computerworld roundup of useful R functions). Bare Combine author Bob Rudis explains how it works as part of his hrbraddins package at https://github.com/hrbrmstr/hrbraddins.

echarts4r is an R wrapper around the powerful and flexible echarts JavaScript library. Find out more at http://echarts4r.john-coene.com. Code for a scatterplot from the mayoral data in the previous chapter is in the echarts4r.R file in the repo.

“Precinct closures harm voter turnout in Georgia, AJC analysis finds” – statistical analysis shows a decline in voter turnout as voters’ distance to their polling location increases. And a wave of precinct closings disproportionately affected people of color. By Mark Niesse and Nick Thieme. Story: https://www.ajc.com/news/state–regional-govt–politics/precinct-closures-harm-voter-turnout-georgia-ajc-analysis-finds/11sVcLyQCHuQRC8qtZ6lYP/. GitHub repo with R code and data: https://github.com/nthieme/voter_deserts/blob/master/Voter_deserts_final.ipynb

“How the Suburbs Will Swing the Midterm Election” – analysis of Congressional District leanings based on population density, by David Montgomery and Richard Florida for CityLab. Includes interactive Shiny app. Story: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/10/midterm-election-data-suburban-voters/572137/. GitHub repo with R code and data: https://github.com/theatlantic/citylab-data/tree/master/citylab-congress.

“How safe are Maryland’s bridges?” – front-page story in the Baltimore Sun finds hundreds are in ‘poor’ condition, many are structurally deficient. Story: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-bridge-collapse-maryland-20180815-story.html. GitHub repo with code and data: https://github.com/baltimore-sun-data/bridge-data.

“What new Census data reveal about wealth, diversity, and connectivity in Maryland” - analysis of American Community Survey Census data. Story: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-acs-census-release-20181206-story.html. GitHub repo with R code using tidycensus and censusapi packages: https://github.com/baltimore-sun-data/census-data-analysis-2018.

“Denied Justice” - Star Tribune’s series that highlighted major problems with how Minnesota investigates and prosecutes rape cases, named a Pulitzer Prize finalist in local reporting.

MaryJo Webster, an experienced data journalist and Excel super power user, said this investigative project was her first major effort using R for all the analysis.

“R was the perfect choice for this because we had data rolling in gradually over many, many months,” she told me on Slack. “I had to re-run the same analysis literally every single week for the better part of 8 months.”

No better statement on why it’s useful to learn a scripting language!

You can see the full series here: http://www.startribune.com/deniedjustice

And a results page she built using R Markdown here: http://strib-data-public.s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/projects/rape/highlights.html.

Tutorials

General

R, RStudio, and the tidyverse for data analysis - Well documented, easy-to-follow beginner tutorial presented at the 2018 Investigative Reporters and Editors’ Computer Assisted Reporting conference. By Peter Aldhous, BuzzFeed News. http://paldhous.github.io/NICAR/2018/r-analysis.html

File organization best practices: How to set up a reproducible workflow in R. Also presented at the 2018 CAR conference. By Andrew Tran, Washington Post. https://andrewbtran.github.io/NICAR/2018/workflow/docs/01-workflow_intro.html.

R for Data Science - This book by Hadley Wickham and Garrett Grolemund will give you a good grounding in R fundamentals as you learn the basics of analyzing data in R. It’s available online for free at http://r4ds.had.co.nz/

A community launched around the book led by Jesse Maegan in 2017 and exploded in popularity the following year. You can find out about the Slack channel at https://medium.com/@kierisi/r4ds-the-next-iteration-d51e0a1b0b82. There’s also a Twitter account \@R4DScommunity.

Wickham recorded an informal, 20-minute video to show his start-to-finish workflow for initially exploring a data set, in this case U.S. building permits. The companion GitHub repo is at https://github.com/hadley/building-permits, which includes a link to the video.

I’ve been creating a weekly screencast for InfoWorld, Do More With R, that aims to show interesting tips in 5 minutes or less. Topics have included using dplyr’s case_when() function, testing code with testthat, and creating dashboards with the flexdashboard package. https://bit.ly/morewithR.

Misc

If there’s one task that almost everyone needs to do in R at one time or another, it’s reorder bars on a graph. This tutorial tells you everything you need to know about using the tidyverse forcats package for reordering ggplot2 bar charts: https://github.com/jtr13/codehelp/blob/master/R/reorder.md

Shiny Web framework

It’s possible to create fully featured Web applications using R, thanks to the Shiny Web framework. There’s a lot of information about Shiny, including a number of tutorials, at https://shiny.rstudio.com.

In addition, DataCamp is offering a free online class, including access to their R cloud platform, to learn interactive Web programming with Shiny. You can search for “Building Web Applications in R with Shiny” at datacamp.com, or head directly to https://www.datacamp.com/courses/building-web-applications-in-r-with-shiny.

Contact info

If you’ve discovered an issue with code or other content in the book, I’m tracking them at the book’s GitHub repository. You don’t need to know git in order to open an issue; all you need is a browser and free GitHub account. Post an issue at https://github.com/smach/R4JournalismBook/issues.

I’d love to hear from you on Twitter \@sharon000 or by email at r4journos at machlis.com.

Added after final manuscript was sent to the printer

Searchable table of 190+ R tasks covered in the book, from the print-edition appendix. With code! https://smach.github.io/R4JournalismBook/HowDoI.html

Stories done with R

“How the Suburbs Will Swing the Midterm Election” – analysis of Congressional District leanings based on population density, by David Montgomery and Richard Florida for CityLab. Includes interactive Shiny app. Story: https://www.citylab.com/equity/2018/10/midterm-election-data-suburban-voters/572137/. GitHub repo with R code and data: https://github.com/theatlantic/citylab-data/tree/master/citylab-congress

“How safe are Maryland’s bridges?” – front-page story in the Baltimore Sun finds hundreds are in ‘poor’ condition, many are structurally deficient. Story: http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-bridge-collapse-maryland-20180815-story.html. GitHub repo with code and data: https://github.com/baltimore-sun-data/bridge-data

“What new Census data reveal about wealth, diversity, and connectivity in Maryland” - analysis of American Community Survey Census data. Story: https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/bs-md-acs-census-release-20181206-story.html. GitHub repo with R code using tidycensus and censusapi packages: https://github.com/baltimore-sun-data/census-data-analysis-2018

Tutorials

General

R Programming at the Urban Institute – This guide features useful explainers with examples and code for ggplot2 visualizations, maps, and code optimization as well as basics. https://ui-research.github.io/r-at-urban/index.html

Videos from sessions at the 2019 RStudio conference: https://resources.rstudio.com/rstudio-conf-2019

Text analysis

Text Mining With R – Abbreviated free online version of the Text Mining with R book by Julia Silge and David Robinson, authors of the tidytext R package. https://www.tidytextmining.com/

Text as Data - open-source version of a class offered by Chris Bail, professor of Sociology, Public Policy, And Data Science at Duke University. https://cbail.github.io/textasdata/

Mapping and GIS

Get slides and R code from Zev Ross’s RStudio Conference 2020 Modern Geospatial Data Analysis with R here: https://github.com/rstudio-conf-2020/geospatial/tree/master/materials That page includes instructions for viewing and downloading slides as well as installing the workshop package with R code.

Machine Learning

Machine Learning Techniques for Investigative Journalism: Tutorial by Ben Heubi, who has worked at the Financial Times and Economist. Examples include what demographic factors were most predictive in the UK Brexit vote and which variables are most predictive of ozone levels. With R code. https://medium.com/@techjournalism/machine-learning-techniques-for-investigative-reporting-344d74f69f84

Julia Silge is posting some great videos on machine learning with the tidymodels package ecosystem, such as with NFL attendance data https://youtu.be/LPptRkGoYMg and hotel bookings data https://youtu.be/dbXDkEEuvCU. Her YouTube channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCTTBgWyJl2HrrhQOOc710kA

Last updated February 14, 2020