Events / Plotting made easy – an introduction to ggplot2

Plotting made easy – an introduction to ggplot2

March 11, 2020
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM

111 Levin Building

Marco Smolla
Postdoctoral Fellow, Theoretical Biology
University of Pennsylvania

 

Frequently we need to plot our data to visualise the results of our experiments. One of the most reusable ways to do so is to program your graphs. When I first heard about it, it sounded ridiculous to me, but hear me out. Often our data are preliminary and they might change over time or you need a slightly different figure to comply with the standards of a journal or conference. Using the tools that ggplot2 provides allows you to create publication-ready figures (e.g. as PNG or PDF) that not only look nice but can even help you to better understand your own data. That you can reuse the code for other figures and easily adapt the code to produce different looks, and make changes to the graphs, are only two reasons that outweigh the up-front investment in learning how to use ggplot2. In this workshop, I will run you through the basics, explain the principles and terms that are used by this software package to get you started.