FAQ: Intro to Visualization with R - Manual Aesthetics

This community-built FAQ covers the “Manual Aesthetics” exercise from the lesson “Intro to Visualization with R”.

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This exercise can be found in the following Codecademy content:

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FAQs on the exercise Manual Aesthetics

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The example mentioned “darkred”. Which other colors are available in the library?

Hi, what’s the difference between aes(alpha=0.5) and alpha=0.5. Could someone please help me explain? Thanks.

You can find it here. http://www.stat.columbia.edu/~tzheng/files/Rcolor.pdf . Hope it helps.

By helping ahmadarhum.alam, I think I understand now:

  • aesthetic mapping: R automatically chooses the color for us
  • manual mapping: we choose the color for ourselves.
    Would really appreciate if someone can verify or improve this.
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Hi, can someone explain how to differentiate data-driven and manual aesthetics?
It wasn’t very clear to me, it would mean a lot, thank you.

Hey guys,
is there a difference in assigning the alpha value of the geom_point() layer this way:

viz <- ggplot(data=movies, aes(x=imdbRating, y=nrOfWins)) +
       geom_point(aes(color=nrOfGenre, alpha=0.5)) 

Compared to the solution, which gets it out of the secondary bracket:

viz <- ggplot(data=movies, aes(x=imdbRating, y=nrOfWins)) +
       geom_point(aes(color=nrOfGenre), alpha=0.5) 

I tried both in RStudio and they provide the same result. I would have thought it’d be best to keep all values in that secondary bracket together…

What is considered best practice?