Lab 2

Overview

The purpose of this lab is to get you to try different methods of visualizing the same data to explore what seems to work better.

Data

We’ll work with fivethirtyeight data. via the R package of the same name.

To get started, please run the following lines of code. The GitHub install in particular will take a minute or two.

install.packages("fivethirtyeight")
remotes::install_github("fivethirtyeightdata/fivethirtyeightdata")
library(fivethirtyeight)
library(fivethirtyeightdata)

One you’ve loaded the packages, you will have access to a variety of datasets. The datasets we will work with are google_trends, tv_states, and comic_characters.

Assignment

Start a new R Markdown document - you can choose to house this lab on GitHub or not. Either way is fine. If you choose to work together with a partner or in a small group a GitHub repo is required.

Both the google_trends and tv_states datasets come from a fivethirtyeight story about how the media covered hurricanes and Trump.

1. Start with the google trends data.

• Visualize the change in trends for each hurricane over time in one plot with three scales. Map color to a discrete scale.
• Visualize the trends again, this time with solid shapes (if your first plot was already solid shapes, use lines). Hint, geom_area can be difficult to work with if you have a grouping factor. Try geom_ribbon instead.
• Visualize the same relation, but change the scales so color is mapped to a continuous scale (the other scales should be discrete).
• Create a data frame (using tibble() or data.frame()) that includes the dates that each hurricane made landfall. Annotate one of your first two plots to include these reference points with vertical lines (Hint: use geom_vline(), specifying the data source for this layer as this new dataset). You do not have to include text annotations - just the vertical lines, but if you would like to try, look into geom_text() or geom_label(). The hurricanes made landfall on (approximately) the following days:
  • Harvey: August 25, 2017
  • Irma: September 10, 2017
  • Jose: Did not make landfall
  • Maria: September 20, 2017
• Make any final modifications to the plot you’d like to communicate the information as effectively as possible

2. Replicate the “National cable news networks” plot from the story using the tv_states data. Don’t worry about all the labels. Try to match the colors but don’t worry about getting them exact.

3. Use the comic_characters dataset to visualize the proportion of different genders using at least three different methods. With your final visualization, make any additional modifications you think would help reduce the cognitive load necessary to comprehend the figure.

Finishing up

When you have finished the above, upload your rendered (knit) HTML file to canvas.