Communicating with Data in the Tidyverse

In this chapter, you will have a first look at the data you're going to work with throughout this course: the relationship between weekly working hours and monetary compensation in European countries, according to the International Labour Organization (ILO). After that, you'll dive right in and discover a stunning correlation by employing an exploratory visualization. You will then apply a custom look to that graphic – you'll turn an ordinary plot into an aesthetically pleasing and unique data visualization.

Barcharts, scatter plots, and histograms are probably the most common and effective data visualizations. Yet, sometimes, there are even better ways to visually highlight the finding you want to communicate to your audience. So-called "dot plots" make us better grasp and understand changes in data: development over time, for example. In this chapter, you'll build a custom and unique visualization that emphasizes and explains exactly one aspect of the story you want to tell.

Back in the old days, researchers and data analysts used to generate plots in R and then tediously copy them into their LaTeX or Word documents. Nowadays, whole reports can be produced and reproduced from within R and RStudio, using the RMarkdown language – combining R chunks, formatted prose, tables and plots. In this chapter, you'll take your previous findings, results, and graphics and integrate them into such a report to tell the story that needs to be told.

Your boss, your client, or your professor usually expects your results to be accurate and presented in a clear and concise structure. However, coming up with a nicely formatted and unique report on top of that is certainly a plus and RMarkdown can be customized to accomplish this. In this last chapter, you'll take your report from the last chapter and brand it with your own custom and unique style.