Cédric Scherer

Data Visualization & Computational Ecology

The World's Countries Colored by Their First Letter

While preparing the mapping section for a Pearson–O'Reilly training, I got the idea to visualize the first letter of each country. And got especially curious about how much landmass each letter covers. Turns out: A, C and R are covering the largest areas!

Posted by Cédric • Friday, August 27, 2021

A Quick How-to on Labelling Bar Graphs in ggplot2

Bar charts are likely the most common chart type out there and come in several varieties. Most notably, direct labels can increase accessibility of a bar graph. I got a request how one can add percentage labels inside the bars and how to highlight specific bars with {ggplot2}. This short tutorial shows you multiple ways how to do so.

Posted by Cédric • Monday, July 5, 2021

Colors and Emotions in Data Visualization

As data visualization practitioners we are both engineers and designers. In our effort to create meaningful visualizations from our data, we transmit our message not only through the particular chart type and title we choose, but also through our choice of colors for the data itself and for any additional design elements.

Posted by Cédric • Tuesday, June 8, 2021

Visualizing Distributions with Raincloud Plots (and How to Create Them with ggplot2)

Raincloud plots, that provide an overview of the raw data, its distribution, and important statistical properties, are a good alternative to classical box plots. In this tutorial, I highlight the potential problem of box plots, illustrate why raincloud plots are great, and show numerous ways how to create such hybrid charts in R with {ggplot2}.

Posted by Cédric • Sunday, June 6, 2021

My Contributions to the First 30DayChartChallenge

This April, Dominic Royé and I hosted the first #30DayChartChallenge, a data visualization challenge with the aim to create a chart every day of April with a given prompt. In total, we collected 1,960 contributions from around the world!

Posted by Cédric • Sunday, May 9, 2021

My Personal Data Visualization Year 2020

Even though it was a crazy and exhausting year, there were also some good and exiting things happening. Therefore I've decided to take a short break on New Year's Day and look back at some of the positive moments of my personal data visualization journey during 2020.

Posted by Cédric • Friday, January 1, 2021