WebR IS HERE!

WebR 0.1.0 was released! I had been git-stalking George (the absolute genius who we all must thank for this) for a while and noticed the GH org and repos being updated earlier this week, So, I was already pretty excited. It dropped today, and you can hit that link for all the details and other… Continue reading

Using the new Plot Javascript Exploratory Visualization Library Sans-Observable

The fine folks over at @ObservableHQ released a new javascript exploratory visualization library called Plot last week with great fanfare. It was primarily designed to be used in Observable notebooks and I quickly tested it out there (you can find them at my Observable landing page: https://observablehq.com/@hrbrmstr). {Plot} doesn’t require Observable, however, and I threw… Continue reading

Your data vis “Spidey-sense” & the need for a robust “utility belt”

@theboysmithy did a [great piece](http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/6f777c84-322b-11e6-ad39-3fee5ffe5b5b.html) on coming up with an alternate view for a timeline for an FT piece. Here’s an excerpt (read the whole piece, though, it’s worth it): Here is an example from a story recently featured in the FT: emerging- market populations are expected to age more rapidly than those in developed… Continue reading

Some Light Image Processing & Creation With R

>UPDATE: I rejiggered the function to actually now, y’know, do what it says it should do :-) A friend, we’ll call him _Alen_ put a call out for some function that could take an image and produce a per-row “histogram” along the edge for the number of filled-in points. That requirement eventually scope-creeped to wanting… Continue reading

A Tale of Two Charting Paradigms: Vega-Lite vs R+ggplot2

This post comes hot off the heels of the [nigh-feature-complete release of `vegalite`](http://rud.is/b/2016/02/27/create-vega-lite-specs-widgets-with-the-vegalite-package/) (virtually all the components of Vega-Lite are now implemented and just need real-world user testing). I’ve had a few and seen a few questions about “why Vega-Lite”? I _think_ my previous post gave some good answers to “why”. However, Vega-Lite and Vega… Continue reading

Create Vega-Lite specs & widgets with the vegalite package

[Vega-Lite](http://vega.github.io/vega-lite/) 1.0 was [released this past week](https://medium.com/@uwdata/introducing-vega-lite-438f9215f09e#.yfkl0tp1c). I had been meaning to play with it for a while but I’ve been burned before by working with unstable APIs and was waiting for this to bake to a stable release. Thankfully, there were no new shows in the Fire TV, Apple TV or Netflix queues, enabling… Continue reading