1st Edition

Practical R for Mass Communication and Journalism

By Sharon Machlis Copyright 2019
    260 Pages
    by Chapman & Hall

    260 Pages
    by Chapman & Hall

    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.

     

    Introduction

    Why programming?

    Why R?

    Is this book for you?

    1. Get Started With R in a Few Easy Steps
    2. 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

    3. See How Much You Can Do in a Few Lines of Code
    4. 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

    5. Import Data into R
    6. 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

    7. Basic Data Exploration
    8. 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

    9. Beginning data visualization
    10. 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

    11. Two or more data sets
    12. 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

    13. Analyze data by groups
    14. 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

    15. Graphing by Group
    16. 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

    17. Write your own R functions
    18. 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

    19. Maps in R
    20. 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

    21. Putting it all Together: R on Election Day
    22. 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

    23. Date calculations
    24. 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

    25. Help! My data’s in the wrong format!
    26. 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

    27. Integrate R With Your Storytelling Using R Markdown
    28. 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

    29. Simple Web scraping
    30. 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

    31. 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

    Biography

    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.

    "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