Animation

A few weeks ago I attended a text analytics hackathon, that was immensely enjoyable. Text analysis is something that is quite far from my average day job and I really enjoyed picking up some new skills and playing with the tidytext package. If you are looking to dive into text analytics, I thoroughly recommend the brilliant Text Mining with R book by Julia Silge and David Robinson. The data we experimented with at the event was the three scripts from THE Star Wars Trilogy (you know which one I mean) and I was keen to see if we could use sentiment analysis to distinguish whether a character was from the Light or Dark side.

Whilst browsing twitter last night I came upon this tweet by the currrent author of gganimate: I've started a gganimate wiki page in order to collect examples. If you want to showcase your animations and help others learn in the process, consider submitting an issue as described on the main page #rstats https://t.co/VrT5IV2izr — Thomas Lin Pedersen (@thomasp85) August 16, 2018 Now I’ve been experimenting a lot with creating animations with R, and I absolutely love using gganimate .

Whilst I was rooting around for inspiration, my girlfriend suggested I should do a post about food, quickly followed up by “burgers!!!”. So a few google searches later and I decided to create an animated map, showing all the countries of the world that had at least one Burger King store. I’m particularly chuffed that I’ve managed to combine a multitude of really cool packages in this post. We’ve got:

On my journey to creating my animated Premier League table in my previous post, I noticed a lot of examples for creating gifs using the magick package. The gist behind the majority of these examples was to create a sequence of snapshots which could be combined together to create animations. Whilst not quite as seamless as gganimate, it appears to be much more versatile. So I thought I would try and make one.

For my inaugural blog post I decided I would step into the world of animated graphics for the first time. I was inspired by the presentation that Thomas Lin Pedersen gave at the useR! conference on gganimate and was motivated to create my very first gif. I rooted around for ideas and decided upon creating an animated table of the Premier League for the last season, with the clubs being depicted by their crests.