Computational Statistics: 2. Data Viz

Jo Hardin

Three monsters are painting data viz portraits. Two of the monsters carry boxes labeled `themes` and `geoms`. All of the data viz portraits look like ggplot figures.

Figure 1: Artwork by @allison_horst.

Agenda

September 7, 2021

Cholera: what went (didn’t go) well with the graphics?
Challenger: what didn’t go (went) well with the graphics?
Thoughts on plotting (with example(s))

Class discussion will be based on Tufte (1997) Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions. (Use Google to find it.)
Another great reference is the following text: Fundamentals of Data Visualization by Wilke at http://serialmentor.com/dataviz/

September 9, 2021

Grammar of graphics
ggplot

Readings

Class notes: Visualization
Tufte (1997) Visual and Statistical Thinking: Displays of Evidence for Making Decisions. (Use Google to find it.)
Wickham (2017) Data Visualization in R for Data Science.

Reflection questions

When creating a graph, try to sketch / image the graph before you code it. What do you want R to do (what is the goal)? In order to do that, what does R need to know?
What should the goal of a plot be? What should the goal of your plot be?
What different aspects deconstruct a plot?

Ethics considerations

Does your plot make the comparison of interest: easily? and accurately?
Did you add alt text to your images (see Writing Alt Text for Data Visualization)?
Is your plot accessible to those who are color blind or looking at the image in black and white?

Slides

In class slides for both 9/7/21 and 9/9/21.
WU2 - Tufte
WU3 - ggplot

Additional Resources

DuBois’s images online and in W.E.B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America, a compilation edited by Whitney Battle-Baptiste.
Flowcharts for choosing appropriate plots, brief tutorials of viz types, and source code in R and Python: from Data to Viz
See something or Say Something
Census trends visualized
Visualization Internship (Fall 2021) at 538
visualizing data: Digest of the best visualizations from the past month
A regular NYT column on visualizations: What’s Going on in this Graph?
Studies about visualizations and perception
Fundamentals of Data Visualization

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/hardin47/m154-comp-stats, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Hardin (2021, Sept. 7). Computational Statistics: 2. Data Viz. Retrieved from https://m154-comp-stats.netlify.app/posts/2021-09-07-dataviz/

BibTeX citation

@misc{hardin20212.,
  author = {Hardin, Jo},
  title = {Computational Statistics: 2. Data Viz},
  url = {https://m154-comp-stats.netlify.app/posts/2021-09-07-dataviz/},
  year = {2021}
}