Polishing the dot plot

Communicating with Data in the Tidyverse

Timo Grossenbacher

Data Journalist

Factor levels

The order of factor levels determine the order of appearance in ggplot2.

ilo_data$country

Austria        Belgium        Czech Rep.     Finland       
France         Germany        Hungary    ...
 ...
 17 Levels: Austria Belgium Czech Rep. Finland France ... United Kingdom

Reordering factors with the forcats package

Needs to be loaded with library(forcats)
fct_drop for dropping levels
fct_rev for reversing factor levels
fct_reorder for reordering them.

¹ Learn more at tidyverse.org (http://forcats.tidyverse.org/)

The fct_reorder function

ilo_data

# A tibble: 34 x 4
      country   year hourly_compensation working_hours
        <fct>  <fct>               <dbl>         <dbl>
 1    Austria   1996               24.75      31.99808
 2    Austria   2006               30.46      31.81731
 3    Belgium   1996               25.25      31.65385
 4    Belgium   2006               31.85      30.21154

ilo_data <- ilo_data  %>% 
    mutate(country = fct_reorder(country, working_hours, mean))
ilo_data$country

17 Levels: Netherlands Norway Germany Sweden ... Czech Rep.

Nudging labels with hjust and vjust

ggplot(ilo_data) +
  geom_path(aes(...)) +
  geom_text(
        aes(...,
            hjust = ifelse(year == "2006", 
              1.4, 
              -0.4)
        )
    )

Let's practice!

Communicating with Data in the Tidyverse