R in the New York Times

The New York Times graphics department maintains a fascinating blog providing a behind-the-scenes look at the construction of graphics appearing in the paper and on the web site. Many of the posts deal with R, which the graphics department apparently uses a lot.

In this post they show you some graphs pertaining to political party dominance in state government, and this subsequent post shows the R code used to design the charts. The post also provides the raw data, so you can recreate the plots. What I really like about this post (and the blog in general) is that it doesn't just advertise the finished product (which is typically excellent), but it shows you the process by which the team arrived at the finished product.

Two of my favorite R-related posts are those depicting all passes made by each player on the US Women's Soccer team, and this one comparing the Facebook IPO to other IPOs (this post doesn't mention R, but I'm 99.9% sure that the graphs are produced in R --- axis variable names like test$date give it away).