Data Visualization for Environmental Epidemiology with ggplot2: Mastering Presentation Grade Figures#@

This half-day workshop, led by a diverse, all-female panel of new researchers, will offer live-coding and interactive examples using R statistical software. This session will begin with a brief introduction to the ggplot2 package and supporting packages. Next, we will cover general practices for manipulating data structures and data formatting for creating ggplots. We will spend the majority of the workshop introducing examples of various plots that are frequently used in environmental epidemiology, focusing on the following aspects: Adding confidence intervals to point estimates; manipulating background, axis, titles, legends, colors, themes; creating maps; saving and exporting high quality figures for presentations and publications.

Impact/Purpose

Data visualization is critical to conveying new findings in environmental health and is a vital part of advancing the field of environmental epidemiology around the globe. There are a variety of options for creating figures with licensed software, but data visualization packages like ggplot2/R are easily accessible and economical alternatives that can produce high quality and journal-ready figures. The syntax of ggplot2 is challenging to learn, so this workshop aims to allow participants to become comfortable with the syntax of ggplot2, create elegant, complex figures, and be comfortable applying the skills learned to their own research projects.

Citation

Wyatt, L., A. Krajewski, AND A. Larsen. Data Visualization for Environmental Epidemiology with ggplot2: Mastering Presentation Grade Figures#@. International Society of Exposure Science 2021, Virtual, NC, August 06, 2021.