As a statistician with an interest in public policy and the communication of information I am a huge fan of the kind of data visualisationg that regularly appear on websites such as fivethirtyeight, the new york times and the guardian. I believe that a good data visualisation allows readers to investigate data for themselves and will hopefully raise peoples interest in a subject.
In an attempt to learn how to improve my data presentation, I have been trying to learn how to use the R statistical programming package. Whilst there are other programmes which are a match for data manipulation and statistical analysis R, as an open access piece of software, benefits particularly from a very productive programming community. This community seems to excel at creating methods that allow relatively straightforward production of high quality data visualisations.
One very productive developer is Yihui Xie. He was key in producing blogdown, a package which allows you to create websites and blogs using R.
Following this guide and also with reference to a blog by Amber Thomas (whose design I decided to copy) I managed to create this site by using R only.
If you’re particulalry interested in data visualisation I recommend you have a look at the books (and tweets) of Alberto Cairo and Andy Kirk who are the two authors I’ve enjoyed following.