What Is clauswilke.com?

clauswilke.com is the personal academic website of Claus O. Wilke, the Jane and Roland Blumberg Centennial Professor in Molecular Evolution at The University of Texas at Austin. It serves as a hub for his professional biography, blog posts, projects, talks, and generative art. If you are looking for his R packages, his open-source data visualization book, or his writing on data science and visualization, this site is the primary source.

Who Is Claus O. Wilke?

According to the site's biography section, Wilke is a Professor of Integrative Biology at UT Austin. His background includes:

• A PhD in Theoretical Physics from the University of Bochum in Germany
• Postdoctoral training in biological physics in Chris Adami's lab at Caltech
• Extensive publication in computational biology, molecular evolution, protein biochemistry, and virology

He is also a well-known contributor to the R data visualization ecosystem. The site notes he has authored several popular R packages, including cowplot, ggridges, and ggtext, and is a regular contributor to ggplot2.

What Content Does the Site Offer?

The site is organized into several main sections:

Blog

Recent posts listed on the homepage include:

• "Writing a blogdown post for the ages" (Sep 8, 2020) — on making blogdown posts that render far into the future
• "PCA tidyverse style" (Sep 7, 2020) — performing a PCA using the tidyverse
• "New site design" (Aug 19, 2020) — announcing a redesign and move
• "Fundamentals of Data Visualization" (Jan 23, 2018) — announcing work on the book
• "Move over Strunk and White" (Nov 12, 2017) — favorite books on storytelling, copy editing, and writing productively

Projects

• Generative art — visual art created by mathematics and randomness
• Fundamentals of Data Visualization — an open-source book on data visualization, written entirely in R Markdown
• Virtual Books — blog posts collected into book-like form

Talks

Selected talks include:

• "Upping your Dataviz Game" (Oct 14, 2020, Santa Fe, NM) — covering select chapters from Fundamentals of Data Visualization, including how to tell a story and how to prepare data
• "Spruce up your ggplot2 visualizations with formatted text" (Jan 30, 2020, San Francisco, CA) — on using the ggtext package to add formatted text to ggplot2 figures, including plot and axis labels

Who Is This Site For?

This site is useful if you:

• Want to learn about Claus Wilke's research and academic background
• Are looking for documentation or background on his R packages (cowplot, ggridges, ggtext)
• Want to read Fundamentals of Data Visualization or learn about the book
• Are interested in data visualization techniques, tidyverse workflows, or reproducible writing with blogdown
• Want to watch recorded talks on ggplot2 and data visualization

A Note on the Content

The site states that opinions expressed there are personal and are not meant to represent the official position of The University of Texas at Austin. The homepage also provides high-resolution head shots for download.