Hey folks, I’m really grateful for the people who have emailed me recently to thank me for making the recreation and makeover videos. I’ve been excited to see the types of figures some of you are trying to make. It’s really been a great part of this work for me. Thank you! Eric Hill is a loyal Riffomonas Channel viewer who recently sent me an animation he made using the p5.js platform. The animation shows his son’s performance relative to other runners in the prestigious Nike Cross Nationals...
13 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, One of the benefits of sending out these newsletters and making my YouTube videos is that I get a ton of practice. I can’t emphasize how much practice has paid off in learning to use dplyr, ggplot2, and other packages. Reproducing published figures has really helped me to dive into parts of ggplot2 that I wouldn’t normally use because I make plots that use the features of ggplot2 that I know. By expanding my knowledge of ggplot2, I’m finding that the plots I make from scratch are...
20 days ago • 6 min read
Hey folks, I hope you’re enjoying my new approach of integrating the newsletter with my YouTube videos. The feedback I’ve gotten has been very positive. Thank you! I’d love it if you were to reply to this email with a link to the most recent figure you found in your reading of the literature or popular media. This week, I’m sharing with you Figure 5D from a paper recently published in mSystems by Charlie Bayne and colleagues where they looked at the effect of interactions between tryptophan...
27 days ago • 4 min read
Hey folks, At long last the {phylotypr} R package is on CRAN! I posted a video on Wednesday describing the process of submitting the package. Then on Thursday, I submitted a manuscript to Microbiology Resource Announcements that describes the package. Hopefully, it will be published soon. MRA is a pretty nifty journal that published short (~500 words) articles describing resources that microbiologists might find useful. There aren’t supposed to be any results, just a description of the...
about 1 month ago • 3 min read
Hey folks, I’ve submitted (and re-submitted and re-re-submitted!) the {phylotypr} R package that I’ve been developing on the YouTub channel. I’m optimistic that {phylotypr} should be on CRAN in the next few days. With that, I’ll be moving on to a new strategy with my videos. My plan is to take the narrative that I present in these newsletters and go through the process of re-producing the figures I discuss. I recorded the first one yesterday and I think you’ll really like this new series. Can...
about 1 month ago • 7 min read
Hey folks, This week I hosted the first live ensemble programming session. It went really well. We had fun and learned a lot. If you’d like to get in on these types of sessions, let me know and I’ll be sure you get a special invitation for the next series. I really believe that this form of instruction is critical to making the material learned in compact workshops stick for the long term. I hope you had fun working with the broken axis chart last week! This week I want you to look at Figures...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Hey folks, I’d love to hear your experiences trying to recreate the figures I’ve been discussing in recent newsletters. Does a “verbal” description of my thought process for each figure help? Can you pick a figure and do it yourself? What are the biggest obstacles to translating between the verbal description and actual code? Feel free to reply to this email to let me know how you like this approach. Also, if you have a figure you’d like me to walk through, I’d love that too! This week I want...
about 2 months ago • 7 min read
Hey folks, As you know, I’ve been encouraging folks to strengthen their intuition of how to make different types of plots in R. Some of that is through this newsletter. Some of that is by engaging in mob programming with your research group and others. I received a great email this week from Devin Drown, a professor at the University of Alaska in Fairbanks, that just made my day: I want to thank you for sending out this newsletter and the past few with visualizations. This past week, I used...
2 months ago • 7 min read
Hey folks, I hope you all are doing well! Before digging into today’s figure, I wanted to remind you that I’m offering a new interactive training opportunity. The goal is to provide greater opportunities to hone your skills in a social setting. My experience with leading this approach has been excellent. I can’t wait to have you give it a try with me. Please let me know if you have any questions. This week, I’m grateful to Georg Andersson for sharing an interesting figure with me from Sweden....
2 months ago • 6 min read
