Hey folks, I’ve now produced three livestream videos. What do you think? Do you watch them live or watch them later? Or are they too long? I’m looking for honest feedback! I have to admit that if I hadn’t livestreamed these videos, they would not have been produced. It’s nice that I can more or less record and post without any editing. This is still a bit of an experiment. I think fewer people are watching the episodes which makes me worry that this might be an overall step backwards for you all. I want what I do to have maximum benefit, so please don’t hesitate to respond to this email and let me know what you think. Yesterday morning, I received a newsletter from Philip Bump who writes a column for the The Washington Post. He has a couple of newsletters, but this one is an “add on” to his columns where he shares more of the data behind what goes into his columns. Although not overly complicated, I thought this would be a fun “basic” plot for beginners but enough ornamentation for more advanced R users. This plot was an add on to his column on a generational rift in the Democratic Party in the aftermath of the New York City mayoral primary election. In this plot he uses March 2025 data from Gallup to compare how the two parties differ in their support for Israelis versus Palestinans. So, how would I go about making this plot? We need the data. If you go to the Gallup article, the second plot has three tabs. One each for Democrats, Republicans, and Independents. The plots show the percent, by party, who support Israelis or Palestinians. In the lower left corner of the plot is a link to “Get the data”, which downloads a CSV-formatted file for the data in each plot. We’ll need to get both the Democrat and Republican datasets. Also, we’ll need to go back to the first plot and get the data for “All Americans”. For each of these files, we’ll need to read them in and join them into a single tibble. We can read the three files in to a single tibble using Again, at the fundamental level, this is a line plot with three groups. We can do this in Now for the ornamentation. First, the axes will need some help. There are no axis titles or ticks. Those can be removed with Second, the gridline choices are “interesting”. The y-axis gridlines look fairly standard. However, we’ll have to add a thicker black line at zero. For the x-axis gridlines he has one at 2016 and October 7, 2023. We’ll have to make those x-axis gridlines and the zero line using Finally, there is text in the right hand margin indicating what each line represents. We can place the text using All in all, this should be a less intense plot than what I’ve been making lately. At the same time, we get to practice some fun stuff with text. I think it will also give an opportunity to compare how we use
|
Hey folks! The summer is nearly over - where did it go?! Many of us are getting ready to send our kids off to school and start a new academic year. If you’re subscribed to this newsletter, I suspect you are interested in improving your data visualization skills. You can certainly continue to receive this newsletter and watch my weekly livestreams on YouTube for free to help increase those skills. If you want a more concentrated or personalized opportunity to develop your data visualization...
Hey folks! I’d love to have you join me in September for a new approach to teaching workshops that I will be rolling out. For five weeks I’ll be working with two cohorts of you all to improve our data visualization skills. Each week we’ll meet for a two-hour session. These sessions will include instruction on principles and concepts in data visualization and an opportunity to apply this information to visualizations we find in the wild or that you bring to the group. By not talking about...
Hey folks, Are you interested in uping your data visualisation skills? I’m rolling out a new program to help you improve the design of your data visualizations. This program will last 5 weeks starting at the beginning of September. Each session will be two hours long and include a discussion of data visualization principles followed by an opportunity to apply these ideas to your own visualizations. There will be no coding in this program so you can focus more on concepts than implementation....