deeptime: an R package that facilitates highly customizable and reproducible visualizations of data over geological time intervals

William Gearty 

Data visualization is a key component of any scientific data analysis workflow and is vital for the summarization and dissemination of complex ideas and results. One common hurdle across the Geosciences and other scientific fields remains the reproducibility of many types of visualizations of data over long time intervals (10⁴⁺ years). Here I introduce the R package deeptime, which provides easy-to-use functions to facilitate fully reproducible visualizations of geological data. The package includes functionality to add various geological timescales to many different types of plots, use standardized stratigraphical patterns within figures, visualize continuous and discrete temporal data, and more. By leveraging the existing framework of the ggplot2 R package, deeptime allows for these visualizations to be highly customizable. The open-source and constantly evolving package is accompanied by exhaustive documentation about the myriad options available to users and several tutorials demonstrating the available functionality. My hope is that deeptime will reduce the amount of time and experience needed to make reproducible and professional data visualizations, giving scientists more time to ensure that these visualizations are more accessible and engaging.