Shiny Apps and R Packages

A Shiny App to make text sing

I built a quick Shiny App to help users apply Gary Provost’s writing advice.

A map-based data visualisation with dancing emojis

The feral pigs caught my eye in the Brisbane dataset, and then things got rather silly.

A quick experiment with WebR: how much can I do in under an hour?

I got a leaflet through my door the other day with a bar graph that just didn’t look right. It inspired me to create a tool to easily create a bar graph online, so that people can do a quick side-by-side comparison. I’ve been wanting an excuse to give WebR a go, and this seems like a good place to start, so I thought I’d live blog my way through my first hour of playing with WebR. Ready, get set, go!

About

Hi! I’m Cara. A data visualisation consultant with an academic background, specialising in helping research teams and data-driven organisations turn their data insights into to clear and compelling visualisations. I have earned a solid reputation for making complex things easy to understand, and offer a range of solutions to meet clients where their needs are.

Align your axes

Applying a few formatting tricks and a custom function to make sure the x axes line up nicely across different plots.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Alignment cheatsheet

I’ve used {ggtext}’s geom_textbox() a lot in my recent data visualisations, but, every time, I end up resorting to a bit of trial and error to get the alignment just right. Time to create a cheatsheet that will be useful to my future self, and hopefully to a few others also.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Arists, their lifespans, and their most productive times

Creating storytelling data art about artists - how meta.

Articles

Welcome to my blog! Its original title, “pars pas les mains vides!” which translates as “don’t leave empty-handed!”, conveys what I’m aiming to do: capture things I’ve picked up along the way in the weird and wonderful worlds of #rstats, data science and dataviz, and share them with others who may find them useful for their own adventures.

Feel free to pinch the best bits and reuse them for your own purposes - that’s what these articles are here for! And if you want to say thanks or hello, get in touch!

Automating sentences with R

Automating text in R, and making the output look human.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

BarsBeRight

Beautifully Annotated: Enhancing your ggplots with Text

R-Ladies Cambridge | Inaugural lunchtime dataviz meetup

Building a Dataviz Design System for a Medical Research Project

RMedicine 2023 | Lightening talk

Cara Thompson, Data Visualisation Consultant

Beautifully crafted and memorable data visualisations are an undisputed asset in maximising the impact of your work. Let your plots do the heavy lifting!

Hi, I’m Cara. I offer a range of solutions to help individuals and organisations make the most of data visualisations to maximise the impact of their expertise. Whether through training, collaborations, or commissions, the aim is always the same: clients feeling confident that they can use data visualisations to communicate important patterns in their data in a way that will engage their desired audience.

Crafting a data-driven fundraising campaign

Breaking down the process involved in creating a data-driven fundraising campaign for Origin Scotland.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Credit where it’s due: changing the canonical URL of a post

A quick change in the YAML header to keep the search engines happy.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

DuBois Challenge: Recreating his innovative spiral graph, and animating it!

Revisiting DuBois’ data visualisation was a masterclass in innovative techniques for creating compelling visualisations which push the boundaries of “normal” visualisations while being intuitive to their intended audience.

Dynamic annotations: 10 tips for better text

Shiny in Production 2023 Keynote | Ten tips for better text in dataviz, using data from the Great British Bake Off

Formatting numbers for easy readability in R

Sometimes you want a raw number. Other times, you want a number that you can instantly verbalise. This post explores an easy solution for getting from “1234567890” to “1,234.6M” without installing any additional packages.

Getting fonts to work in R

Getting fonts to work in R and RStudio can be tricky! This post walks through the different steps we need to follow to give ourselves the best chance of success.

How to make data viz that matches your organisation’s branding

Picking a colour scheme that ties in with a client’s brand or that evokes the subject matter behind the data is what allows datavisualisations to contribute to, rather than detract from, the main story the client is seeking to tell. This post covers both the design steps and the coding steps involved in creating bespoke colour schemes.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Level Up Your Labels: Tips and Tricks for Annotating Plots

user!2022 - Poster and Elevator Pitch

Level Up Your Plots: A Code-along Workshop

Online Workshop @ NHS-R 2022 Conference - November, 2022

Level Up Your Plots: Enhance the story telling capabilities of your datavisualisations

RUG @ HDSI - September, 2022

Level Up Your Plots: Using colour, annotations, text hiearchy and other tricks to make your data story stand out

NHS-R 2023 Conference | Online code-along workshop

Level up your plots: Using colour, text hierarchy and annotations to create compelling and memorable data visualisations

RMedicine 2023 | A code-along workshop

Machine learning, penguins and explanatory data visualisations

An annotated data visualisation to illustrate the decision-tree model classification of penguins into species based on their flipper and bill lengths

Monochrome Trigonometry

Three sets of points, all sharing the same base equation, dance together forming a whole.

New year, new laptop, new library location, new version of R!

Eek? Starting again wasn’t nearly as painful as it used to be, thanks to {installr} and the generosity of people posting solutions online.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

Oops!

Looks like you’ve found a broken link. Please let me know about it so I can fix it!

Palatable Palettes: Five tips for creating and applying bespoke colour schemes

NHS-R Community Conference | Five tips for making good use of colours in your ggplots

Portfolio

Whether you’re looking for crystal clear communication of data insights, an artistic response to the data, or something between the two, I enjoy putting together stand-out visuals which will keep the conversation going.

R-Ladies Edinburgh | Level up your plots

An in-person code along workshop exploring how to make good use of colour and text hierarchy in our plots and their annotations

Services

I offer a range of solutions to help individuals and organisations harness the power of data visualisation to maximise the impact of their expertise. Whether through training, collaborating, or crafting something for you, the aim is always the same: clients feeling confident that they can use data visualisations to communicate important patterns in their data in a way that will engage their desired audience.

Setting up a generative art project using #rstats and GitHub Actions

For the last wee while, I’d been wanting to explore the fascinating field of Generative Art and add a continuous deployment project to my portfolio. Enter the @aRtfulBot, a Twitter bot I created to explore both of these at once!

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

So much more than pretty graphs: The value of creating and implementing a dataviz design system in R

NHS-R 2023 Conference | Online talk

Talks

These pages feature a combination of recordings, slide decks and reusable code. This section of my website is intended for public use - reuse as much of it as you like in your own context, and feel free to share links to talks you think others would enjoy. Happy plotting!

Ten tips for better text: Typography meets ggplot and friends

RLadies Rome | A code-along workshop

Testimonials

Part of what I love about what I do is the variety of projects I get to help out with, making other people’s work shine while allowing them to reinvest their time where their expertise adds the most value. Take a look at what others said about what we achieved together.

Text sings

A shiny app designed to help users make their text sing!

This too

Turning headlines into art - A therapeutic response to #Partygate.

Turning a 16th century theological data visualisation into an interactive network graph

This hierarchical graph looked too structured to the people talking about it. So I reworked it into something a bit more organic…

Using colour and annotations for effective storytelling

Workshops for Ukraine | A 2-hour code-along workshop

Variations on a ggtheme: Applying a unifying aesthetic to your plots

NHS-R Community Conference | Three reasons why you should apply a bespoke ggplot theme to your plots & how to do that

Visualising Male and Female representation

A shiny app providing intuitive datavisualiations of text analyses to allow users to reflect on the representation of Male and Female persons in their text.

Visualising crop proportions - treemaps and line graphs give a different impression!

Catching up with #TidyTuesday data after prioritising a few other things. Having grown up in La Beauce I couldn’t not do this one.

Visualising the rise of the use of mobile phones

Another #TidyTuesday contribution, reminiscing about the old Nokias.

Visualising trends of chattiness and IMDB ratings in Avatar: The last airbender

Using ggplot to combine traditional plots, polar bargraphs and images in a data visualisation to tell a story about a group of more or less chatty characters

Welcome to Pars pas les mains vides!

Welcome to my blog! Its title, which translates as “don’t leave empty-handed”, conveys what I’m aiming to do: capture things I’ve picked up along the way in the weird and wonderful worlds of #rstats, datascience and dataviz, and share them with others who may find them useful for their own adventures.

Cara Thompson, Cara Thompson

monochromeR

An R package to easily create, visualise and use monochrome colour palettes

verbaliseR

Make your text mighty fine!