Data Visualization (Summer 2025 PMAP 8551/4551) News

What’s next?

A bunch of you have asked me what other R-related classes you can take. Good news—there are a bunch!

Class website future

Hello everyone!

Sessions 13 and 14 tips and FAQs

Session 12 tips and FAQs

When you load the Natural Earth data for Exercise 12, it includes 169 columns:

Session 11 tips and FAQs

Curiosity and bare minimuming

Two layout-related tips for fancier plots and documents

As you’ve seen in your past exercises, sometimes your visualizations can get large and complex and they start to feel squished and unreadable. You’ve already seen some ways…

Session 10 tips and FAQs

In exercise 10, you were supposed to include your enhanced plot in the Quarto document with your reflection, but it was a little tricky to do.

Session 9 tips and FAQs

The short version: geom_text() puts text on every point in the dataset; annotate() lets you add one item of text somewhere in the plot.

No more answer keys

Mini project 1 feedback

Sessions 7 and 8 tips and FAQs

Tips for fixing broken code

Lots of the code you run in this class is actually a big long chain of functions or plot layers, like {dplyr} functions that are all connected with |>s or {ggplot2}…

A few quick general R tips

Time to think about mini project 1!

Make RStudio your own

Now that you’ve been using RStudio for a while, I’d recommend playing around with the settings and customizing it. Here are some important/neat things you can do in…

Sessions 5 and 6 tips and FAQs

Session 4 FAQs

Session 3 FAQs

Zeroes and ✓−s in the gradebook

Session 2 FAQs

Copy, paste, and tweak

Learning programming is a little different from learning other skills or materials. In other classes you’ve taken, you read articles or textbooks, take notes on them, talk…

Making cleaner, nicer Quarto documents

Session 1 tips and FAQs

How to ask for help

When working through the examples or exercises, you will get stuck. It’s inevitable.

First day of class!

Building community on Discord

The most common question I get from students before the class is this:

Announcements and updates

Over the course of the semester, I’ll be sending you lots of updates and announcements and FAQs.

Important R stuff

From reading the syllabus you’ll notice that we’re using R in this class. R is free (!!), and highly sought after by employers, but it has a little bit of an initial…

Welcome to class!

Hello everyone!