1  Introduction

This book is intended to be a single source of recipes for the exhibits that go into HVTI CORR publications and presentations: the figures, drawn with ggplot2 Wickham (2009), and the tables that travel with them. The compendium is collected from the figures and tables we have included over the course of publications.

The book is divided into multiple parts collecting different bits of information. The Getting Started part gives a brief introduction to how we use R and which packages we use. The catalog parts that follow are one chapter per exhibit, and the Tables part is where the manuscript’s other exhibit lives – the inventory you run on a new extract, the Table 1 that summarises it, the Word table a journal asks for, and the small tables that ride alongside a figure.

If you take one thing from this book, take the shape of the workflow: construct, plot, decorate, save. An hv_*() constructor does the analysis and hands you a bare ggplot. You add scales, labels, and a theme. You save it for wherever it is going. The figure’s content is decided once and its appearance as many times as you have audiences, and because every recipe makes its own data, you can always go back to a working example and adapt it. A table is built the same way, a summary object first and a renderer second, so the shape carries over even though the functions do not.

Wickham, Hadley. 2009. Ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis. Springer New York.