Why does a boxplot in ggplot requires axis x and y?

Question

I have a variable ceroonce which is number of schools per county (integers) in 2011. When I plot it with boxplot() it only requires the ceroonce variable. A boxplot

Answer 1

There are no fancy statistics happening here. boxplot is simply assuming that since you've given it a single vector, that you want a single box in your boxplot. ggplot and geom_histogram simply don't make that assumption.

If you want a bit less typing, you can do this:

qplot(y=escuelas$ceroonce, x= 1, geom = "boxplot")

ggplot2 will automatically create a vector of 1s equal in length to the length of escuelas$ceroonce