Data visu­al­isa­tion has become very vogue in the digital human­it­ies com­munity. Although there have been a scat­ter­ing of brave prac­ti­tion­ers over the past few years, only very recently has this inter­dis­cip­lin­ary area star­ted to fea­ture prom­in­ently at DH con­fer­ences as a main­stream prac­tise worthy of consideration.

For the last few months I have been look­ing for an oppor­tun­ity (i.e. a bit of time) to delve into R and Pro­cessing, spe­cific­ally with an eye towards tak­ing some exist­ing visu­al­isa­tions I am work­ing on to a new level. R in a Nutshell

The first book of interest is R in a Nut­shell by James Adler recently pub­lished by O’Reilly.

R is a lan­guage and an envir­on­ment to sup­port data ana­lyt­ics and visu­al­isa­tion. Its approach­able, extens­ible and open source. One of the advant­ages of R over other comers is the num­ber of rather pol­ished inter­pret­ers avail­able for it and some of the great examples float­ing about that have been con­struc­ted in R. Hence my interest. I come to this interest from a digital human­it­ies back­ground and wondered whether the lan­guage could be of use for work­ing with my own data com­ing from farm diar­ies explor­ing the cycle of sea­sonal farm activities.

I had an oppor­tun­ity to per­use this volume and put it through it’s paces. I come to R as a neo­phyte hav­ing not attemp­ted any cus­tom data visu­al­isa­tion devel­op­ment aside from using com­mer­cial tools such as SAS, SPSS and Tableau or web ser­vices to cre­ate hand­craf­ted visu­al­isa­tion for refine­ment in illus­trator or Photoshop.

R in a Nut­shell, as a book, is tar­geted at a user much like me. It offers a vari­ety of approaches ran­ging from mater­ial for abso­lute begin­ners to exper­i­enced R users who would like to broaden their use of the envir­on­ment. It allows for pick and choose areas of interest deigned to provide a bespoke learn­ing course.

What do you need R for? Do you need to cre­ate cus­tom­ised stat­ist­ical maniupla­tion of large data­sets not typ­ic­ally accom­plished using SPSS or SAS on your desktop? R may be the tool for you. This book is superb intro­duc­tion to the tool, but it also serves the func­tion of handy desktop com­pan­ion for explor­ing further.

Start­ing from a detailed over­view of the vari­ous ways in which R can be deployed on dif­fer­ent oper­at­ing sys­tems and addressed as either a gui-based applic­a­tion to com­mand line oper­a­tion. Adler makes copi­ous use of great examples of code to play with your­self. The struc­ture of the book offers diverse pat­terns of approach to cater to people of all levels of exper­i­ence with R. It is well organ­ised and has the use­ful abil­ity to loc­ate inform­a­tion when it is of imme­di­ate applic­ab­il­ity. If there is a down­side, it is the amount of time it takes to play through examples to really determ­ine whether R is the tool for you. I cer­tainly can’t fault the book for this espe­cially as it offers such a well struc­tured approach to learn­ing R. How­ever, I can see where a digital human­it­ies scholar who hadn’t ever con­sidered doing any bit of code and waded into R right off the bat may simply be dis­cour­aged by a sys­tem­atic pro­cess of intro­duc­tion rather than a cook­book approach.

Gettign Started with Processing

This is where we make a clever shift to our other book of interest: Get­ting Star­ted with Pro­cessing by Casey Reas and Ben Fry. As you might sus­pect this book takes a very dif­fer­ent and pos­sibly more use­ful to a neo­phyte approach — moreover, I really enjo

yed this book. In a word it is superb. It approaches learn­ing Pro­cessing from simple begin­nings and truly embraces the idea of learn­ing by doing. It is full of exer­cises and short snip­pets of dis­cus­sion that simply ‘get you Pro­cessing’. As an added bene­fit and a superb way to do things, the latest down­load­able builds of Pro­cessing include all the examples in this book access­ible through the Examples menu. So as you work along you can edit to your hearts con­tent and if you want to start with code and just simply tweak, you have it at your fin­ger tips. If your style of learn­ing is oth­er­wise and you want to manu­ally work through the examples, do that and if at the end things don’t quite work out you have the work­ing code read­ily avail­able. This works very well.

The book is organ­ised into a few simple and gen­eral chapters. As you dig down into the recipes within the chapters you are presen­ted with the breadth of the lan­guage. This approach wouldn’t work if things were formal and too struc­tured. How­ever, this book is very informal in tone and approach and you play­fully fol­low through, not really con­scious that you are fol­low­ing a rigid path.

Even the typo­graphy of the book adds to the fun. There are over­sized head­ers and very nicely visual word snip­pets of the ‘exper­i­ence’ of play­ing with Pro­cessing. It adds a won­der­fully lyr­ical aspect to the book and really engages so as to keep you read­ing and play­ing along with the authors. The book mixes visu­als and tex­tu­als very well. The decision to use ‘sketchy’ visu­als as though they were hand-drawn keeps with this informal and engaged approach. Works for me.

Pro­cessing is very power­ful and I feel that after work­ing through this book I can see some very excit­ing pro­jects that I can con­sider for my own work. I feel armed with just enough inform­a­tion to be dan­ger­ous and look for­ward to play­ing fur­ther. For this I will fall back more on Pro­cessing (pub­lished a few years back) the more defin­it­ive guide to the wealth of options avail­able in the lan­guage. This is where R in a Nut­shell offer the bonus of being a fine tutorial, but also a very use­ful ref­er­ence tool. These are books about rather dif­fer­ent pro­gram­ming tools that offer very dif­fer­ent per­spect­ives on accom­plish­ing sim­ilar things. They provided me with a great intro to both tools. many books prom­ise to be logical in their struc­ture and to build to the more com­plex. I found that R in a Nut­shell adop­ted a more reasoned approach to this. By that I mean the author sought to provided a vari­ety of struc­tured paths through the mater­ial depend­ing on level of expert­ise or desired outcome/usage of the lan­guage. These were well con­sidered. I apprroached this from the per­spect­ive of the com­plete neo­phyte (not a dif­fi­cult role to fill — nor that far-fetched). Get­ting Star­ted with Pro­cessing was more fun.

I should note that both of these books were provided in elec­tronic form for review and I am grate­ful to Mary Rot­man at O’Reilly for mak­ing this possible.