A Gentle Introduction to Network Visualisation

How can we map a conversation on Twitter? How can we spot patterns a large corpus? Who are the main influencers on a specific topic on the web? During this talk, we’ll try to find the answers these questions (and to others) with network visualisations.

As R users, we are used to work and visualise data in a tabular way — rows and columns are our tools of choice. Yet, this kind of approach does not always fit with complex models such as networks, which are structures driven by relationship between elements. And for these special cases we need special visualisations, which come with specific conventions and specific tools.

During this talk, Colin will start with a brief reminder of what is graph theory, introduce a methodology to create your first network visualisation, and will present you some packages developed for network visualisation in R — first of all packages built on top of ggplot2, but also other packages especially designed for representing this special type of data.

Colin Fay
Data Analyst, ThinkR

Colin Fay is Data Analyst, R trainer and Social Media Expert at ThinkR, a French agency focused on everything R-related.

His main area of expertise are (obviously) R, but also text mining, data visualisation and social media. He is a prolific open source developer, author of more than 10 R packages actively developed on GitHub (5 of them being on CRAN), contributor to several packages, creator of a bot tweeting about R in French, and an open data advocate. He is a member of the RWeekly team, a collaborative news bulletin about R, and the cofounder of the Breizh Data Club, an association of French data professionals. He is also the creator of Data-Bzh, a French collaborative website about data and Brittany.

A selection of R packages developed by Colin:
{proustr}, Tools for Natural Language Processing in French and texts from Marcel Proust’s collection “A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu”,
{rpinterest}, an R package to access the Pinterest API,
{tidystringdist}, string distance calculation the tidy way
{lexiquer}, a wrapper around Lexique3.81, a Natural Language Processing Database for French
{remedy}, an RStudio addin to facilitate R Markdown writing.