ggplot2, a data visualization library for the R programming language [Wickham 2016], is a popular way of creating plots, based on the philosophy of the grammar of graphics: a consistent philosophy of “layering” various parameters together to create computer graphics [Wilkinson 2005]. This approach separates data and presentation and makes it easy to quickly adjust presentation approaches and experiment with visualizations.

We present a new Racket library, Graphite, inspired heavily by ggplot2 and the grammar of graphics. Graphite builds upon Racket’s existing plot library [Friedman and Raymond 2003; Toronto 2010], but provides an easy-to-use interface focused on data visualization rather than plotting mathematical functions. By taking data frames directly as input, Graphite handles the conversions between intermediate data representations to enable quickly switching between bar charts, line graphs, and scatter plots with a single keyword change, and focuses on the do-what-I-mean style of the grammar of graphics. Although it is still quite new, Graphite offers a high level of ergonomics with relatively little code, resulting in more efficient construction of effective visualizations. We demonstrate the approach, and the results, with a tour of data visualizations taken from Kieran Healy’s Data Visualization textbook [2018].