PLOTCON 2016: David Robinson, gganimate: Animation within the grammar of graphics

Animation is a powerful tool for creating engaging and dynamic data visualizations. Here I introduce the R package gganimate, which extends the popular ggplot2 package to allow the construction of animations within the layered grammar of graphics. The package’s philosophy treats time as a visual aesthetic that can be mapped to an underlying variable, just like position, color, or size. This offers both a high-level declarative grammar for describing animated visualizations and an intuitive software implementation, letting the user focus on visualization choices rather than programming logic. I show several examples of animations that can be concisely defined with this package, including explorations of Hans Rosling’s Gapminder dataset and educational illustrations of regression and smoothing methods.

David Robinson is a Data Scientist at Stack Overflow. In May 2015 he received his PhD in Quantitative and Computational Biology from Princeton University, where he worked with John Storey on statistical genomics and experiment design. He is the author of the broom, fuzzyjoin and gganimate R packages, and writes about R, statistics, and education at his blog Variance Explained.