leonardovaleriano/dataviz-book

"Data Visualization: charts, maps and interactive graphics" (the making of)

Data Visualization: charts, maps and interactive graphics: the making of

This repository accompanies my book Data Visualization: charts, maps and interactive graphics, which was published by CRC Press in collaboration with the American Statistical Association in 2018. It is part of the CRC-ASA series on Statistical Reasoning In Science And Society. The code and explanations here are also available on my own website, and you might prefer to view that if you are not a complete Git.

I explain how I made the images in the book, and some of the back story behind the examples made by others. Everything is arranged by chapter. There are code files for R and Stata, data files, and SVG original images. All the code files here are my own work and I release them under The Unlicense.

The Table Of Contents is here as TOC-dataviz.pdf

Files are named after the chapter and figure numbers. Each chapter has a .md Markdown file that you should read first. Where there is no .svg for a particular image, this is explained in the .md file. As of 2018, GitHub seems to display SVGs that came from Stata or Inkscape, but struggles with those that came straight from R's svglite::svglite graphics device. Hopefully that will get sorted out soon; you can always download them and view them locally, and they should appear all right if you follow the same link on my website, although there are still some quirks between browsers.

My general workflow is to make a basic chart out of the data in R or Stata, and then export it as SVG (a vector graphics format which contains instructions to make the image -- put a circle here and a line there -- without committing to any image size or dots per inch), in many cases edit it in the text editor or Inkscape (vector graphics editor), and occasionally in GIMP (raster graphics editor) betwixt SVG and PNG for publication (but I tried to avoid that). Some images were created ex nihilo in the text editor. This is all discussed for individual images in the .md files, but in many cases the SVG tweaking was just to make text legible in book format, which is perhaps not necessary for your own work if you want to adapt what is here.