Instructions: This is a warm-up assignment designed to help you practice reading data visualizations. This is an important first step in being able to create your own (effective!) visualizations in this class.

This assignment, like all assignments that you complete in this course, is prepared in R Markdown: a markup language that allows you to easily format your code for readability and reproducibility. For more information about formatting in R Markdown, click on the question mark button in the menu bar of your Markdown document in RStudio, or read the online documentation.

Problem 1 (optional)

Complete the third chapter (“Introduction to R Markdown”) of the DataCamp course Communicating with Data in the Tidyverse.

Note: There is nothing to submit – this is just a placeholder to remind you to do the assignment. Your progress should be automatically registered through DataCamp. It doesn’t matter what grade you get or how many hints you take. Your goal is simply to complete the chapter by the deadline.

Problem 2

Find a data visualization you think is interesting. Some ideas: NYTimes, VisualisingData.com, Visual.ly. Remember to cite your source!

Include a link to the webpage showing the visualization using the Markdown link syntax: [text-of-link](url)

If possible, in addition to including the link the page, you can embed the image itself in your Markdown document using the Markdown image syntax: ![alt-text](url-of-your-image-file-here)

Note that the Markdown link should not be in an R chunk! You do not need to write R code to complete this assigment.

Respond to the following questions:

  1. What is the data that are being visualized? Where did they come from?
  2. Which variables are mapped to which visual cues?
  3. How does this inform your understanding of the data?
  4. Critique:
    • If you liked the visualization: what is it doing well?
    • If you disliked the visualization: what would you change?

You should submit this assignment on Moodle as an .Rmd file. Please make sure that your Markdown document compiles before uploading! If it doesn’t, it will be returned to you to be fixed, which may incur a late penalty.

Grading Rubric

There are 12 possible points on this assignment.

Baseline (C level work)
  • +3 for an .Rmd that compiles without errors
  • +3 for including a data graphic or having a link to one
Average (B level work)
  • +1 for each of the four questions you answered
Advanced (A level work)
  • +1 unnecessary messages from R are hidden from being displayed in the HTML (message = FALSE)
  • +1 at the discretion of the instructor for exceptionally thoughtful or insightful responses