Polishing Charts

Due: Oct 28 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 1% of your final grade.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to learn some techniques for adding “polish” to your charts. We will start choosing colors and fonts more carefully, and we will also annotate our charts with informative text.

Assessment: This assignment is graded using a check system:

• ✔+ (110%): Responses shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
• ✔ (100%): Responses are thoughtful, well-written, and show engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
• ✔− (50%): Responses are hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that this is essentially a pass/fail system. I’m not grading your writing ability and I’m not counting the number of words you write - I’m looking for thoughtful engagement. One or two sentences is not enough. Write at least a paragraph and show me that you did the readings assigned.

1. Get Organized

Follow these instructions:

1. Download and edit this template.
2. Unzip the template folder. Make sure you actually unzip it! (in Windows, right-click it and use “extract all”)
3. Open the .Rproj file to open RStudio.
4. Inside RStudio, open the hw8.qmd file, take notes, and write some example code as you go through the readings / exercises below.

2. Readings

This week we’ll get into the weeds with techniques for polishing up your charts. This is a critically important step for making your charts easy for others to understand and effective as a central tool for communicating important results. It’s also where you can be highly creative!

• How to polish ggplot charts: R4DS Chapter 28 - Graphics for communication
• Wilke: 4 - Color scales
• Rost: Which color scale to use when visualizing data

Optional

• Wilke: 21 - Multi-panel figures
• Check out the patchwork package for merging multiple charts together
• How to make a multi-panel figure with a shared legend.
• Check out this tool for simulating color blindness.
• Check out these tools for customizing your Rmd file: PIMP my Rmd

3. Practice polishing

Go back to a previous figure you’ve made somewhere - in class, in a previous homework, etc. Using some of the principles in the readings you just read, try to make a more polished version of your figure. Can you customize the fonts? colors? Annotate it? Try to make a chart that is publication-ready.

4. Reflect

This week, include in your reflection an image or link to a chart you’ve seen that you felt was really well-polished

Reflect on what you’ve learned while going through these readings and exercises. Is there anything that jumped out at you? Anything you found particularly interesting or confusing?

Write at least a paragraph in your hw8.qmd file, and include at least one question. The teaching team will review the questions we get and will try to answer them either in Slack or in class.

Some thoughts you may want to try in your reflection:

• Write about an interesting data visualization about trends you’ve seen.
• “I used to think ______, now I think ______ 🤔”
• Discuss some of the key insights or things you found interesting in the readings or recent class periods.
• Connect the course content to your own work or project you’re working on.

5. Submit

To submit your assignment, follow these instructions:

1. Render your .qmd file by either clicking the “Render” button in RStudio or running the command quarto::quarto_render("hw8.qmd") command.
2. Open the rendered html file and make sure it looks good! Is all the formatting as you expected?
3. Create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment and submit it on the corresponding assignment submission on Blackboard.