This week, we will learn some of the technical details of how to write code to create “good” information visualizations that follow the design principles we discussed last week. We will focus on graphing amounts, distributions, and proportions. The readings listed below are broken into two groups: 1) design principles, and 2) coding techniques to achieve those principles. Now, open up whatever you takes notes in best and take notes while reading through the following readings:
The design principles discussed in the following readings repeat many of the concepts we saw last week, except focused on the particular subset of charts for this week:
Optional readings:
The readings below discuss two important components that we will run into a lot in making charts: factors & facets. Factors are categorical variables, but dealing with them in R can be somewhat messy. Fortunately, we have the forcats package to help us tackle these! Facets, on the other hand, are rather straight forward to implement and offer a handy technique for creating charts when you have many different variables to consider at once: