Wordclouds are one of the most visually straightforward, compelling ways of displaying text info in a graph. Of course, we have a lot of web pages (and even apps) that, given an input text, will plot you some nice tagclouds. However, when you need reproducible results, or getting done complex tasks -like combined wordclouds from several files-, a programming environment may be the best option. In R, there are (as always), several alternatives to get this done, such as tagcloud and wordcloud.

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...start using R, from scratch!

Some time ago, since I was able to use R by myself, have found some fellows and other people who wanted to learn R as well. Then I pointed them to help pages, to CRAN repositories… but in some cases they said that didn’t know how to start using those resources. Obviously, the main self-perceived limitation for non-programmers is the use of “commands” -ok, many of the 80’s kids will remember the use of some command lines to access games such as PacMan, Frogger… 🙂

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I like heatplots with p-values -or frequencies, or whatever-. Not very conclusive, but pretty anyway. And when talking about graphs, pretty will make our neurons to fire in more interesting ways: neurons like “pretty” graphs. Moreover, observing your data can be as important as analysing it. It’s better to observe, to listen your patients than making tests without knowing very much about them… In the heatmaps of the previous post, not a lot of information can be included.

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Watercolor plots

R has been recognised as the most powerful statistical tool for displaying graphs. In the last years, R’s awesomeness in depicting relationships between variables is exploding with great packages such as ggplot2. One can simply walk around some R blogs, and find something like this: The ‘watercolor’ plot (aka à la Solomon Hsiang). Once you click these links above, you will forget completely about my blog, so… wait! I have to show a graph I made with the code provided there!

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aurora-mareviv

Anesthesiologist, MD, postdoc. Utter Rstats geek

Universidade de Santiago de Compostela

Spain