Alec Albright – Looking Outwards – 07

The ggplot2 package for the R programming language, as created by Hadley Wickham, Winston Chang, Lionel Henry, and Thomas Lin Pedersen in 2016, is a data visualization tool that innovated the process of creating graphs in R. It outlines a “grammar of graphics” that is extremely versatile and easy to implement, which are its most admirable traits. The algorithm allows users to map different variables from a dataset to a variety of different aesthetics (shape, x or y axis, color, etc.) with very easy customization. In this versatility, the authors were able to manifest their dedication to allowing for flexible visualizations beyond traditional methods. Overall, this package incredibly useful in computational data visualization and has revolutionized how data analysts look at their data.