Data Visualization (Fall 2025 PMAP 8551/4551) News

Week 13 FAQs

So many of you asked some variation of this! You learned about visualizing time with column charts, with heatmaps, with stripes, with lines, and so on. Many of you are…

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!

Week 12 FAQs

Absolutely! ggplotly() works with geom_sf(). Here’s a regular static map:

Grades, zeroes, and ✓−s in the gradebook

Mini project 1 feedback

Week 11 FAQs

If you make changes to your website later, you can update the live version by running quarto publish again. It’ll go a lot faster after the first time because you won’t have…

Week 10 FAQs

Great work with exercise 10 and following the Urban Institute style guide! That process is completely normal and good practice for any future jobs you might have. Most…

LLMs are bad and dangerous for learning how to code in this class

In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class.

Week 9 FAQs

A couple weeks ago there was a related FAQ about all R packages, and I gave you some helpful strategies for finding R packages in general.

Week 8 FAQs

Ha yeah, so despite what we covered back in the week on uncertainty, violin plots aren’t actually that great and there are better alternatives.

Week 7 FAQs

There are tens of thousands of R packages, and there’s no good way of knowing what’s out there. A lot of that is because packages are often created for some really specific…

Week 6 FAQs

This can be frustrating! You’ll type some code, thinking that it’s what you need to write to make a plot, and then nothing works.

Week 5 FAQs

Yep. Leland Wilkinson—the guy who invented the idea of the grammar of graphics and wrote the literal The Grammar of Graphics book—was actually a semi-cofounder of Tableau.…

Week 4 FAQs

Week 3 FAQs

Week 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

Week 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.

Welcome to class!

Hello everyone!

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…