title: Is there a way to make a bubble chart in R where the bubbles touch and one axis represents values?
body: <p>I would like to create a bubble chart where the x-axis and size of the bubbles represent values, but the y-axis is irrelevant.  I would also like the bubbles to not overlap but be positioned next to each other.  Essentially, I'm trying to replicate this chart (just the bubbles, not the pie charts):</p>
  <p><a href="https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/06/us/politics/convention-word-counts.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/09/06/us/politics/convention-word-counts.html</a></p>
  <p>Is there a way to do this in R, preferably using ggplot2?  geom_jitter doesn't quite do the trick because I can't get the bubbles to reliably touch.  ggrepel doesn't currently have a solution for points: <a href="https://github.com/slowkow/ggrepel/issues/20" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://github.com/slowkow/ggrepel/issues/20</a></p>
  <p>Are there any other ideas?</p>
  <p>Edit:
  Here is an example data set and one attempt that I've made.  This attempt uses geom_jitter, but obviously the bubbles are not positioned against each other as they are in the NY Times example above.</p>
  <pre><code>library(ggplot2)
  seed(1)
  
  bubble_data = data.frame(
    variable = paste0(&quot;bubble_&quot;, 1:10),
    x_value=runif(10),
    size=runif(10)
  )
  
  bubble_data %&gt;% 
    ggplot(aes(x = x_value, y = 1, size = size)) +
    geom_point(position = position_jitter(seed = 1), alpha = 0.5) +
    geom_text(aes(label = variable), position = position_jitter(seed = 1)) +
    theme_void() +
    theme(legend.position = &quot;none&quot;)
  </code></pre>
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/EpQdu.png" rel="nofollow noreferrer">chart_attempt</a></p>