Quarto & Plotting

Due: 2023-09-12 by 11:59pm

Weight: This assignment is worth 1.33% 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 “Quarto” 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. Get Organized

Follow these instructions:

  1. Download and edit this template.
  2. Unzip the template folder. Make sure you actually unzip it! (in Windows, right-click it and use “extract all”)
  3. Open the .Rproj file to open RStudio.
  4. Inside RStudio, open the hw2.qmd file, take notes, and write some example code as you go through the readings / exercises below.

Notice that this week’s template is a .qmd file, which is called a “Quarto Markdown” file (or just “Quarto” file). You’ll learn about what these files are and how they are different from .R files in the readings for this week. From now on, we’ll mostly be using Quarto files for our assignments (including your project deliverables).

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

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? Write at least a paragraph in your hw2.qmd file, and include at least one question. The teaching team will review the questions we get and will try to answer them either in Slack or in class.

If you’re unsure where to start with a reflection, try filling out this template:

“I used to think ______, now I think ______ 🤔”

5. Submit

To submit your assignment, follow these instructions:

  1. Render your .qmd file by either clicking the “Render” button in RStudio or running the command quarto::quarto_render("hw2.qmd") command.
  2. Open the rendered html file and make sure it looks good! Is all the formatting as you expected?
  3. Create a zip file of all the files in your R project folder for this assignment and submit it on the corresponding assignment submission on Blackboard.