Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism / Edition 1

by Sharon Machlis

Overview

Do you want to use R to tell stories? This book was written for you—whether you already know some R or have never coded before.

Most R texts focus only on programming or statistical theory. Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism gives you ideas, tools, and techniques for incorporating data and visualizations into your narratives.

You’ll see step by step how to:

• Analyze airport flight delays, restaurant inspections, and election results

• Map bank locations, median incomes, and new voting districts
• Compare campaign contributions to final election results
• Extract data from PDFs
• Whip messy data into shape for analysis
• Scrape data from a website
• Create graphics ranging from simple, static charts to interactive visualizations for the Web

If you work or plan to work in a newsroom, government office, non-profit policy organization, or PR office, Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism will help you use R in your world.

This book has a companion website with code, links to additional resources, and searchable tables by function and task.

Sharon Machlis is the author of Computerworld’s Beginner’s Guide to R, host of InfoWorld’s Do More With R video screencast series, admin for the R for Journalists Google Group, and is well known among Twitter users who follow the #rstats hashtag. She is Director of Editorial Data and Analytics at IDG Communications (parent company of Computerworld, InfoWorld, PC World and Macworld, among others) and a frequent speaker at data journalism and R conferences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138726918
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	12/26/2018
Series:	Chapman & Hall/CRC The R Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	246
Product dimensions:	8.25(w) x 11.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Sharon Machlis is the author of Computerworld’s Beginner’s Guide to R, host of InfoWorld’s Do More With R video screencast series, admin for the R for Journalists Google Group, and is well known among Twitter users who follow the #rstats hashtag. She is Director of Editorial Data and Analytics at IDG Communications (parent company of Computerworld, InfoWorld, PC World and Macworld, among others) and a frequent speaker at data journalism and R conferences.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Why programming?

Why R?

Is this book for you?

1. Get Started With R in a Few Easy Steps

What we’ll cover

Download R and RStudio

A brief introduction to RStudio

Try out the console

Install packages

Additional infrastructure

Getting help with packages and functions

RStudio keyboard shortcuts

Additional files available online

Wrap-Up

Additional resources

2. See How Much You Can Do in a Few Lines of Code

Packages needed this chapter

What we’ll cover

Simple stock market graphing

Download and graph a city’s median income

So many packages!

Running functions without loading packages

Comparing one city’s data to the US median

Run a remote script to make an interactive map

Bonus map: Mapping income data

Wrap-Up

Additional resources

3. Import Data into R

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

The magic of rio

Import data from packages

What’s a data frame? And what can you do with one?

Easy sample data

Exporting data

Additional resources

4. Basic Data Exploration

Project: Weather data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Download this book’s files

Data summaries

Data ‘interviews’

Slicing and dicing your data set

More sub setting with dplyr

Wrap-Up

Additional resources

5. Beginning data visualization

Project: More weather data

What we’ll cover: How to

Packages needed this chapter

Answer questions with graphics

Easy visualizations in or lines of code

Some basic graphs

The full power of ggplot

Basic ggplot customizations

Code snippets to the rescue

Presentation-quality graphics

Comment your code

Wrap-up

Additional resources

6. Two or more data sets

Project: Multiple files of US airline on-time data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Add one table to the bottom of another

What’s a list, and how do operate on one?

lapply

here () you are!

Wrap-up

Exercise Answer

Additional resources

7. Analyze data by groups

Project: Airline on-time data analysis (cont)

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Lookup tables

Beware of missing values

Bar graph of raw data

Wrap up

Additional resources

8. Graphing by Group

Project: Visualizing airline on-time data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Facets

Housing prices by state

Geofacets

Customizing colors

Color palettes

Other packages that extend ggplot functionality

Wrap-up

Additional Resources

Exercise answer

9. Write your own R functions

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Function basics

seq()

If-then-else

if statements for vectors

A taste of testing

Next steps for your functions

More Resources

Exercise Answer

Exercise Answer

Exercise

10. Maps in R

Map projects this chapter

Skills we’ll cover

Importing shape files into R

Import data for mapping

An even easier way to pull US Census data

Interactive maps with tmap

Importing and joining data

Leaflet and points on a map

geocoding and R’s paste () function

Time to geocode with R (or maybe without)

Mapping points with leaflet

Points and polygons on a single map

Mapping new political boundaries with leaflet

Inspiration: Washington Post investigation

Wrap-up

Additional resources

11. Putting it all Together: R on Election Day

Project: Election data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Election Day preparation

Visualizing election results

Graph for a smaller set of results

plotly

Other interactive alternatives

Wrap-up

(Non-election) inspiration

Additional resources

12. Date calculations

Project: New York City restaurant inspections

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Get started with dates in R

Get NYC inspection data

Wrap-up

Inspiration

Additional resources

13. Help! My data’s in the wrong format!

Project: Election results in a PDF

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Human vs machine optimizing

The raw data

Extracting data from PDFs

Tidying the data

Reshaping the data

‘Long’ data back to ‘wide’

Winners and runners-up

Wrap-up

Additional resource

Using tabulizer to unlock the City Council data

14. Integrate R With Your Storytelling Using R Markdown

Project: Mixing text and R code about that snow data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

R Markdown basics

Create an R Markdown document

R Markdown text syntax

R code chunks

Adding R code to run

Add an R-generated graph

Setting option options

Mixing R within text

Even more options

Repeatability with R Markdown parameters

Wrap-up

Additional resources

15. Simple Web scraping

Project: Download RStudio PDF cheat sheets

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Step: Follow the rules with robotstxt

Step: Get a list of links

Step: Download files

Wrap-Up

Additional resources

16. An R project from start to finish

Project: Local political contribution and election data

What we’ll cover

Packages needed this chapter

Get the data, make it ready for analysis

Standardizing multiple versions of the same name

Making data frames

Analyzing and graphing the results

Visualizing results

Consider R Markdown

Additional resources

Additional resources

More functions, packages and tools worth a look

Stories done with R

Tutorials

Social media, communities, and Web resources

Appendix A Online: How do I

Appendix B Online: Functions

Appendix C Online: Packages

Editorial Reviews

"Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism looks to me like a fabulous resource for those folks who always wanted to learn some more R but were afraid to ask. Definitely recommended." ~Carl Howe, Director of Education, RStudio

"The book can provide a good starting point into working with R. It covers a lot of perspectives that are expected in newsrooms all over the world, especially working with geospatial data. It also provides a lot of good examples and interesting additional resources. The packages used are also mainly part of the standard corpus of R-packages." ~Benedict Witzenberger, Süddeutsche Zeitung

"I am the data editor of a mid-sized newsroom. I have long wished for an Intro to R book that was geared toward journalists, not data scientists. I’ve found that fellow journalists are much more likely to pick up on the intricacies of a computing language like R when they encounter it through a relatable example, like visualizing Election Night votes or analyzing a city council budget. Additionally, there are some R functions that simply aren’t useful for the quantitative needs of most journalists. This is what I appreciated the most about the book – its practical nature (the title doesn’t lie!) Machlis focuses on the concepts that data journalists most frequently encounter and spends little to no time on those they don’t…I also appreciated Chapter 17, "An R Project from Start to Finish." This chapter is exactly why I’ve wanted a journalism-specific Intro to R project that I can recommend to my colleagues" ~Ryann Jones, Deputy Editor, Data at ProPublica

"I like the book. It’s conversationally written, it walks you through common problems in data journalism and for the most part uses the most common libraries to analyze and visualize data…The book’s instructional approach is the real value – it seems aimed at an audience that needs a narrative in order to understand code and analysis. Conveniently, that pretty well describes journalism students and working professionals…I would recommend publication. It advances the field of data journalism and presents a solid text for instructors or practitioners who are interested in R for analysis." —Matthew Waite

"I NEED THIS BOOK. I may adopt it as a textbook." —Alberto Cairo, University of Miami

"I’m reading this book now and it is terrific. Highly recommended for anyone interested in learning R. I will be using this book in my Data Analysis for Journalists class in the spring." ~Rob Wells, University of Arkansas

"Sharon Machlis' 'Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism' is based on the author's workshops for journalists. This book dives straight into doing the kinds of things a busy reporter or news analyst needs to do to meet a 5:00 pm deadline: data cleaning, presentation-quality graphics, and maps take precedence over control flow or the niceties of variable scope. I particularly enjoyed the way each chapter starts with a realistic project and works through what's needed to build it. People who've never programmed before will be a little intimidated by how many packages they need to download if they try to work through the material on their own, but the instructions are clear, and the author's enthusiasm for her material shines through in every example." ~Greg Wilson, RStudio

From the Publisher