r - reorder dodge bar plots (ggplot2)

Question

I have a data frame lot_main that looks like this:

I want to make a bar plot with columns reorders according to the wordcount.

library(ggplot2)
library(viridis)
lotr_main %>% ggplot(aes(x = Character, y = wordcount, fill = Film)) + 
geom_bar(stat="identity",position = "dodge") +
coord_flip() +
scale_fill_viridis("Film",discrete = TRUE, option = "C")

The plot I got:

What I want is for each character, the bars are reorders with the longest on the top and shortest at the bottom. The orders of the bars don't need to be the same for each character.

Answer 1

You essentially want to fill by one thing, and order by another. A solution is thus to pry them apart and create a separate 'order' variable. Of note, I don't know if sorting your bars by value instead of having the same sequence each 'group' makes your plot more understandable.....

create some data:

library(data.table)


set.seed(123)
dat <- expand.grid(group=LETTERS[1:3],
                   subgroup=LETTERS[1:3])
dat$value <- runif(nrow(dat))
setDT(dat)

Create the order variable:

dat[,order:=order(value),by=group]

Create the plot

p1 <- ggplot(dat, aes(x=group,y=value, fill=subgroup,group=order))+
  geom_bar(aes(group=order),position="dodge", stat="identity") +
  coord_flip()
p1