adding labels to ggplot2 point based on column variables

Question

I am trying to add labels to my scatter plot based on another columns variables.

ggplot(differentrace, aes(x=DifferentRace, y=Parents)) + geom_point() + geom_text(label=rownames(differentrace))

My table is

      Parents             Different Race 
1    1 UK born           2.32
2    Both UK born        2.58
3    Neither             2.24 

Output

This is my output, instead of the 1,2,3 labels I would like the labels to be 1 UK born, Both UK born, or Neither. Also I would like to offset the labels slightly to not obstruct the data points.

Thanks

Answer 1

R doesn't consider your Parents column as row names. Instead, it's just another column! So here's the code: ggplot(differentrace, aes(x=DifferentRace, y=Parents)) + geom_point() + ggrepel::geom_text_repel(aes(label = Parents)). I used ggrepel::geom_text_repel to move the text labels away from the points.

Additionally, you have to wrap label = Parents in an aes() call because you want each point to be labelled with the corresponding Parent from the same dataframe; if you don't use aes(), R doesn't know what Parent refers to.