Final call for signing up for the data visualization workshop on Monday (Jan 30th) at the Swedish Oikos conference in Gothenburg! Please send me an email if you'd like to sign up. More info below!
Storytelling with Data: Data visualisation meets graphic design to tell scientific stories
The workshop will go through the elements of a great graph, how to use colour, layout, shapes and more to tell a story with your figures and will then go into a coding tutorial. Storytelling and dataviz are both very fun topics, so we'd like the workshop to be a jolly opportunity for all of us to pause and reflect on how to better communicate our research and maximise the impact of our figures. Regardless of how much (or little) artistic flair you have, there are many ways to make your graphs catchier and more exciting and we look forward to sharing some of them during the workshop.
To make the most of the workshop, please do the following prep in advance.
- Charge your laptop, download R and RStudio and check that they are broadly functioning. If you are not able to bring a laptop, please let us know and we can try to figure something out. We will have extension cords but not enough for every person to be plugged in.
- Install the following R packages in advance. It can be very frustrating if instead of making figures, you are stuck trying to install packages and depending on your laptop, there could be some unforeseen issues, so it's best to try solving them in advance. You can install the packages using the following code:
- install.packages("tidyverse")
- install.packages("ggthemes")
- install.packages("ggrepel")
- install.packages("viridis")
- install.packages("broom")
- install.packages("devtools")
- devtools::install_github("eliocamp/ggalt@new-coord-proj")
- Note that you can first check if you have the packages installed already using library(), e.g. library(tidyverse)
- The ggalt package is the usual trouble maker among these packages. Installing the specific version outlined above from GitHub has worked for many people. If you are not one of them and have tried troubleshooting (e.g., you can google the errors you get) with no luck, you can email gndaskalova@gmail.com for extra help. And if nothing really works, it's just a package, in the workshop we will only use it to change the projection of a map so it's not the most key thing.
- Think of a memorable image that has left a lasting impression on you (it could be from a paper, the media, an infographic, a photo, a drawing, anything visual) and insert it in this google doc (https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zUXlIbEMAJgINW-CEZXHE_B7Q5L0JRkb2HYzngUBcKM/edit?usp=sharing ) together with one sentence text about what made the image memorable for you. Please be careful not to delete other people's images as you insert your own.
- Bring along a figure you have made, together with a one sentence summary of the key message you want to communicate with the figure. The sentence should have a verb and be specific, e.g., instead of "Histogram of population trends after forest loss." You could say "Vertebrate species experienced similar amounts of population declines as increases after forest loss." The figures don't need to be brilliant or a finished and polished product, but if you do bring some kind of a figure (saved on your laptop is fine), there will be an opportunity to get feedback on it from Gergana. Sharing figures with people who are not directly involved in your research can be a great way to get a fresh perspective and new ideas.
If you haven't used R much or at all, you can complete the following tutorial in advance of the conference workshop https://ourcodingclub.github.io/tutorials/intro-to-r/ and that should prepare you fine enough for what's to come in the workshop.
Looking forward to seeing you there!
Anne and Gergana
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Department of Biological & Environmental Sciences
University of Gothenburg
Carl Skottsbergs gata 22B
413 16 Gothenburg
