The Sabermetric bookshelf, #4
One of the great strengths of R is that there are some robust (and always improving) packages that facilitate great data visualization and tabular summaries. Beyond the capabilities built into the base version of R, packages such as ggplot2 (my favourite), lattice, and vcd and vcdExtra extend the possibilities for rendering charts and graphs, and a similar variety exist for reproducing tables. And accompanying these packages have been a variety of fine instruction manuals that delineate the code necessary to produce high-quality and reproducible outputs. (You can’t go wrong by starting with Winston Chang’s R Graphics Cookbook, and the R Graph Catalog based on Naomi Robbins’s Creating More Effective Graphs, created and maintained by Joanna Zhao and Jennifer Bryan at the University of British Columbia.)
Let’s call these the “how” resources; once you’ve determined you want a Cleveland plot (which are sometimes called “lollipop plots”—please, just stop it), these sources provide the code for that style of chart, including the myriad options available to you.
Elsewhere, there has been a similar explosion in the number of books that build on research and examples as to what makes a good graphic. These are the “what” books; the authors include the aforementioned William Cleveland and Naomi Robbins, and also include Stephen Few and Edward R. Tufte. Also making an appearance are books that codify the “why”, written by the likes of Alberto Cairo and Nathan Yau.
The recently published Storytelling with Data: A Data Visualization Guide for Business Professionals by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic falls into the latter category, and it’s one of the best I’ve seen to date. Although the subtitle indicates the intended audience, I believe that anyone involved in creating data-driven visualizations would benefit from reading and learning from it.
The book is relatively software agnostic, although Nussbaumer Knaflic recognizes the …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com