In its raw form, data is completely unintelligible – it’s just a bunch of numbers, and our brains aren’t really good at juggling a bunch of numbers. But our brains are extremely good at seeing patterns in visual images. Well-crafted data visualizations take advantage of that fact to communicate lots of information in an aesthetically pleasing way.
This week, we start building our own visualizations using the
ggplot2 package (a part of the tidyverse). It
will take some time to learn all of the function syntax, so be patient
with yourself. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll have an endlessly
flexible tool for exploring and communicating patterns in your data.
Let’s get started.
Reading Assignments
Before next week, please read and annotate the following:
Team Project
Locate the file R/week-02-ggplot/project-02.qmd in our
code repository. Open it, complete the instructions therein, and submit
the resulting PDF to eLC.