iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by Cara Thompson

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 06/09/2025

💜 Being part of the session on accessibility in official statistics with so many good speakers including @statsgeekclare.bsky.social and @cararthompson.bsky.social

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Reposted by Cara Thompson

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 08/08/2025

It's almost RSS Conference time! I'm excited to speaking in the accessibility in official statistics session organised by @statsgeekclare.bsky.social 📊 📅 Thu 4th Sept, 13:40 - 15:00 🎤 Also speaking: @cararthompson.bsky.social , Olivia Box Power, and Elliot Bridges #DataViz #Accessibility #RStats

Conference poster showing dates as 1-4 September and picture of Edinburgh castle

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 02/06/2025

That's a wrap for the #dataviz workshop I've been leading for the Nordic Society of Human Genetics and Precision Medicine's 2025 conference in Copenhagen. In the run up to the conference, I was sent a plot which it typical in the field (and published in one of the Nature journals). Here's my redo.

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Reposted by Cara Thompson

Nicola Rennie @nrennie.bsky.social · 26/01/2025

It's fantastic to see the #RLadies rotating curator programme back up and running! 💜 I really enjoyed curating when I did it 4 years ago, and I wrote a short blog post about it: nrennie.rbind.io/blog/curatin... I'd highly recommend giving it a go if you're thinking about it! 💜 #RStats

nrennie.rbind.io

Curating for @WeAreRLadies | Nicola Rennie

An overview of my experience of curating the @WeAreRLadies twitter feed.

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Reposted by Cara Thompson

Mid terms are November 3rd 2026. Go register voters. @usrbinr.bsky.social · 29/03/2025

My annual reminder that @cararthompson.bsky.social monochromeR package is irreplaceable when you need to add a level of polish to your tables, charts or graphs

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 28/03/2025

#ggplot folks - I'm updating my teaching materials to move to {marquee} where I can. How do we change font size on the fly in a geom_marquee()? I know we can change colours and bold/italics, etc, but how do we change size? I'm looking for the equivalent of this to add text hierarchy to annotations 👇

Code snippet:

# What I've done up to now for programmatic labels with hierarchy...
plot + ggtext::geom_textbox(aes(label = paste0(component_name, # Surrounding the count value with # styling that makes that value bigger "<span style='font-size:32pt'><br>", count, "</span>")))

# What I'm looking to do...
plot + marquee::geom_marquee(aes(label = ??)))

# How do we do that?

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 07/03/2025

You've got a nice custom #ggplot2 theme, and you use it to make a map or any other graph with fixed coordinates, and the background does this... I've written up a blog post of the different solutions I explored, from the super hacky to the more elegant. www.cararthompson.com/posts/2025-0...

A variant on the Drake meme, with Pingu instead of Drake.

In the top image, he is sad that the frame around his donut plot is cropping the plot and not filling the background space.

In the bottom image, he is happy that the background issue has been fixed: the background colour (dark blue) and its frame (light pink) perfectly fill the space available for the graph.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 19/02/2025

How do you make sense of large numbers, and create something that will draw people in, when these numbers aren't ones we like to dwell on? And how do you humanise those numbers to honour the people they represent? "Could you make a data-driven visual for my new song?" youtu.be/ccnIUL5Z3Y4

youtube.com

Footprints underground - Hannah Featherstone

YouTube video by Hannah Featherstone

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 18/02/2025

It's pretty wild what you can do with geom_text(), transparency, and some careful rescaling of superimposed images at different rates. Here's an extract from a video I'll post more about tomorrow. One of the most challenging projects I've had the privilege of working on.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 24/01/2025

A few weeks ago, a client asked me for advice on how to make use of his new colour palette within spaghetti plots. What seemed like a simple question morphed into a full blog post! www.cararthompson.com/posts/2025-0... Colour can be used to emphasise different stories - pick the approach you need!

cararthompson.com

Building Stories With Data - Optimising the use of colours for storytelling in a spaghetti plot

One of my clients recently asked me for tips on optimising spaghetti plots. Those plots with multiple trend lines all superimposed on top of one another, where it can often be very difficult to figure...

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Reposted by Cara Thompson

Chris Brownlie @bsky.chrisbrownlie.com · 24/01/2025

This week in #rstats: - an R->Fortran transpiler from @t-kalinowski.bsky.social - @posit.co's Opportunity Scholarships - better spaghetti plots with @cararthompson.bsky.social - {httr2}s newest feature - learn {targets} with @rladies.org Philly #data #coding #news www.linkedin.com/pulse/week-r...

linkedin.com

This week in R (2025-01-24)

Opportunities to attend posit::conf(2025); making visualisations beautiful and informative; the latest with {httr2}; more {targets} content and more!

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 13/01/2025

For today's project, I'm having to do a bit of copy-pasting of text from a PDF to add information to a quarto website. Which brings me back to one of my favourite #rstats tricks, and possibly my favourite function name! stringr::str_squish()

Code snipped showing the tidy up of two sentences which are initially very broken up by line breaks and extra spaces, using stringr::str_squish().

# One of my favourite R tricks when copying from a PDF - because we all have to do that at some point!

stringr::str_squish(
"Here's some text that
has come from a
pdf and,
slightly irritatingly, has
lots of linebreaks that it would
take ages to delete one by one. Oh and also
the odd extra space.")

#[1] "Here's some text that has come from a pdf and, slightly irritatingly, has lots of linebreaks that it would take ages to delete one by one. Oh and also the odd extra space."

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 24/12/2024

Merry Christmas, everyone! 🎄 🎵 Name the tune! All done with #rstats + #ggplot2 🤓 I finally got round to exploring using grid::linearGradient()! Here's the code: gist.github.com/cararthompso... P.S. There was some controversy in my family about the tune, but this version looked nicer 😊

Tiny white snowballs on a dark green background depict the tune of "we wish you a merry Christmas". The grid lines help anchor the beat and the tonality. The text in the caption reads "Merry Christmas 2024 and best wishes for 2025. Cara Thompson. Building stories with data."

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 20/12/2024

Festive mode activated 🥳 This has been a brilliant year at Building Stories with Data. I'm so grateful for all the projects I've been able to work on, for the encouragement from my peers, for inspiring conferences and for reconnecting with everyone on here!

A photo of me, smiling and playing the ukulele with a colourful background. My t-shirt reads "Merry and bright" in sequins.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

I use toggl to track the time I spend on projects - but don't always tracking things as much as I should (talk prep / pro bono work, etc.). Has anyone built a tool that automatically tracks how long they spend in #rstats projects? Feels like the stuff of the future, but someone will have done it...

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 25/11/2024

"I loved your talk. Can we stay in touch and keep chatting dataviz?" "Actually, I'll be in Edinburgh soon. Let's do coffee!" Lovely to catch up with @hellopeiying.bsky.social today. Career & coding paths, & snow! If you're after creative explorations of important data stories, 👉 kontinentalist.com

kontinentalist.com

Kontinentalist - We tell data-driven stories about Asia.

Kontinentalist tells data-driven stories about Asia that cut through the noise, bridging the gap between research and the public.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

"I really like the overall look, but I'm finding it hard to tell the difference between the turquoise and the green - is it possible to redo all the graphs with a different colour?" A happy reminder of the joy of setting up colours sensibly when creating dataviz with #rstats. Thank you past self!

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

This looks like a brilliant resource. Thanks for highlighting it!

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Reposted by Cara Thompson

Ansgar Wolsing @ansgarw.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

A map of the EU 27 which is made of the letters of the country names. Each country's shape is formed with the country name.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 19/11/2024

I often talk about choosing colours for #dataviz with #accessibility in mind, but in yesterday's workshop, I was asked a question that came from a different starting point: "I'm colourblind. Are there any tools you can point me to that will help me know if colours look good together?"

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

I really enjoyed today's #dataviz workshop with The Data Lab - Innovation Centre. The recording is out already! I've uploaded it along with the slides and possibly the most comprehensive set of tool-agnostic resources I've compiled to date. www.cararthompson.com/talks/datala...

Screenshot of the YouTube cover image for the talk. It features a black and white photo of me smiling at participants on a laptop. The branding is purple, and the title of the talk: More than pretty graphs: tips, tricks and resources to elevate your dataviz.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 18/11/2024

Last open workshop of the year for me: a tool-agnostic 45 min whistle-stop tour of ways to elevate your dataviz. The focus is on crafting better versions of "normal" visualisations, with lots of signposting to resources. Today 12.30 UK time. See you there! community.thedatalab.com/networks/eve...

community.thedatalab.com

More Than Pretty Graphs: Tips, Tricks, and Resources to Elevate Your Dataviz

Graphs should be making your life easier as you present data. The more intuitive they are, the quicker you can move to commenting on the story, and the more people are likely to keep talking about you...

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 15/11/2024

Heading home from #cestlaviz with a head full of ideas and a heart encouraged by such a vibrant community asking important questions about the role of #dataviz, and doing so in style. Thank you for a brilliant conference!

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 14/11/2024

Catching a flight for Amsterdam shortly, on my way to Utrecht for #cestlaviz! Wonder who I might bump into on my travels... See you there! 🥳

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 08/11/2024

I ❤️ #ggplot. So much fun creating dataviz design system packages to do all the heavy-lifting. Creativity + accessibility + coding solutions that save teams a lot of time 🤓 Just added a few extra bells and whistles to this one, including exploring {marquee} for captions and CSS styling for tooltips.

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 06/11/2024

Sometimes, you just need a quick chat with a friend who you trust to keep you & your code right and add a bit of humour into what turns out to have been more stressful than you realised. The #rstats community has always delivered on that front. Today, I'm grateful for @charliejhadley.bsky.social !

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Cara Thompson @cararthompson.bsky.social · 29/10/2024

So good to see the data / dataviz crew reassemble here! I have missed this. Looking forward to seeing what we've all been up to. In the meantime, I've finally booked my tickets for C'EST LA VIZ. Who will I get to meet there in person? cest-la-viz.nl

media.tenor.com

a group of people are hugging in a living room .

ALT: a group of people are hugging in a living room .

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