Plotting

Due: September 13 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 3% of your final grade.

Purpose: The purpose of this assignment is to get familiar with creating plots using the ggplot2 library and to introduce you to the “RMarkdown” file format.

Assessment: This assignment is graded using a check system:

  • ✔+ (110%): Responses shows phenomenal thought and engagement with the course content. I will not assign these often.
  • ✔ (100%): Responses are thoughtful, well-written, and show engagement with the course content. This is the expected level of performance.
  • ✔− (50%): Responses are hastily composed, too short, and/or only cursorily engages with the course content. This grade signals that you need to improve next time. I will hopefully not assign these often.

Notice that this is essentially a pass/fail system. I’m not grading your writing ability and I’m not counting the number of words you write - I’m looking for thoughtful engagement. One or two sentences is not enough. Write at least a paragraph and show me that you did the readings assigned.

1. Getting Organized

Download and edit this template when working through this assignment. Notice that this week’s template is a .Rmd file, which is called a “R Markdown” file. You’ll learn about what these files are and how they are different from .R files in the readings below.

2. Readings

Open up a notebook (physical, digital…whatever you take notes in best), and take notes while you go through these readings:

  1. Lesson 5 “Data Visualization”
  2. Lesson 6 “Reproducible Reporting”

3. Exercises

Running through these RStudio Primer exercises to practice making charts with ggplot - we’ll do more of this in class next week:

  1. Histograms
  2. Bar Charts
  3. Scatterplots
  4. Line Charts

4. Reflect & Knit

Reflect on what you’ve learned while going through these readings and exercises. Is there anything that jumped out at you? Anything you found particularly interesting or confusing? After reflecting, do the following:

  • Write at least a paragraph in your Rmd file.
  • Click the “knit” button to compile your .Rmd file into a html web page.
  • Open up the resulting reflection.html file in your web browser and see how it looks!

5. Submit

To submit this assignment, create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment. Name the zip file hw2-netID.zip, replacing netID with your netID (e.g., hw2-jph.zip). Then copy that zip file into the “submissions” folder in your Box folder created for this class.