First launched in 2020, A Visual Guide to Some Nineteenth-Century Composers and Their Publishers (https://dstrykowski.shinyapps.io/visualguide/) is an R-based data visualization project that illustrates the publishing activities of (at present) ten prominent composers through a series of interactive charts and maps. This presentation takes my development of the Visual Guide as a case study to demonstrate both the challenges and the opportunities that greet scholars who are working with R for the first time. I’ll talk about how I determined that R was indeed an appropriate software solution for the project, learning the rudiments of the programming language, and familiarizing myself with the many existing packages of code that help to make R such a versatile digital tool. I’ll then introduce the website for the project, which uses R Markdown and was released on the Web using a cloud-based platform called ShinyApps.

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