“Visualise, Optimise, Parameterise!” - Writing dataviz code - UPDATED

From R/Medicine 2025

You’ve collected the initial data, explored the patterns and settled on a few graphs you’ll want to create now and in the future as you revisit the dataset from different angles and with new data as it comes in. How can you make sure that the graphs will be as memorable as possible, while also making life easier for your future self?

In this code-along workshop, we’ll work together on our datasets to:

Settle on the right types of graphs and find colours, fonts and additional styling which complement our storytelling

Apply these colours, fonts and additional styling to the graphs by creating reusable functions and vectors, avoiding all the copy-pasting we’d end up doing otherwise

Add annotations straight from the data to highlight patterns and points of interest
Make the graphs interactive (because why not?)

Adapt our code to create a function with parameters, which will allow us to apply the same plotting function to any number of future datasets, with a few extra options.

To get the most out of our workshop, I encourage you to bring a long a dataset and a basic graph (built with ggplot) that you’ve been working on for it. That should allow you to leave the workshop having made good progress towards a finished publishable product! If you don’t have a dataset you can use, don’t worry, I’ll provide one.

Cara Thompson

Cara is a data visualisation consultant with an academic background, specialising in helping research teams and data-driven organisations turn their data insights into to clear and compelling visualisations.

Following her PhD in Psychology and a spell teaching research methods at Edinburgh Uni, she embarked on a career in psychometrics at the Royal college of Surgeons of Edinburgh. After ten years of helping surgeons and other medical professionals understand complex patterns in exam data, she set out as an independent data visualisation consultant and launched her business “Building Stories with Data”, to continue crafting innovative dataviz solutions for a range of different organisations.

She lives in Edinburgh, Scotland, with her husband and two young daughters. Cara regularly shares coding tips for dataviz online, and genuinely enjoys helping others level up their dataviz skills through talks, bespoke toolkits, organisational training, and one-to-one coaching.

Resources
R/Medicine: https://rconsortium.github.io/RMedici...
R Consortium: https://www.r-consortium.org/