Do you have any recommendations for accessible R tutorials? I would love to get into this a little bit more. R seems quite effective for these kinds of things.
Not a tutorial, but I found the R Graph gallery helpful. When I first got started I typically just poked around for something interesting, downloaded the source and started tweaking parameters and/or loading in new data sets. It can be daunting to create graphs from scratch in R without experience - I found these provided some good training wheels.
