PopAging DataViz Visualizing Population
Data in

A THREE-DAY WORKSHOP AT FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY

  October 22^nd—24^th, 2024
  Around 9 AM – 4:30 PM
  Devoe Moore Conference Room (Bellamy Building)

Instructor:
  Sakeef M. Karim
  skarim@amherst.edu

About the Workshop

PopAging DataViz is a workshop on visualizing population data within ’s graphical ecosystem. During the workshop, we will be using the ggplot2 library as our workhorse. Over the course of three days, workshop participants will be exposed to many of the principles undergirding the Grammar of Graphics framework for visualizing data (see Wilkinson 2005) — a grammar that serves as the lifeblood of ggplot2 and its many extensions.

Then, the course will slowly build in complexity. Concretely, participants will be exposed to modules on (1) generating population pyramids and other plots that are germane to population research (e.g., Lexis diagrams); (2) leveraging interactivity and animations to bring data visualizations to life; and (3) visualizing statistical quantities of substantive interest (e.g., average marginal effects, adjusted predictions) to clarify model results.

The workshop will draw on a range of packages—including, but not limited to, tidycensus, leaflet, mapview and cansim—as well as a series of hands-on exercises designed to concretize high-level concepts and principles related to data visualization. All workshop materials are available (and will be maintained) on this course website and the companion repository.

Shark Tank

PopAging DataViz will feature some (very fun and friendly) competition. For more information, check out the Shark Tank tab.

Sponsors

This short course is being co-hosted by the Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making (CAnD3) and our partners at Florida State University, including the Pepper Institute on Aging and Public Policy, the Center for Demography and Population Health, and the College of Social Sciences and Public Policy.

CAnD3 is hosted at McGill University and supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Inspirations

Cédric Scherer’s (2022) course on Graphic Design with ggplot2, Andrew Heiss’ (2024) course on Data Visualization with R, and the third edition of ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Wickham, Navarro, and Pedersen 2023) all serve as inspirations for this three-day workshop.

Preliminaries

Programming Language

As noted, this short course will be centred around—or anchored to—the programming language for statistical computing and visualization. If you do not have on your machine, please download the open-source software by clicking here before following the relevant prompts.

Integrated Development Environment

Participants are encouraged to run their code using RStudio,¹ a powerful open-source IDE optimized for . If you do not have RStudio on your machine, you can download the application by clicking here.

Packages

Before the workshop, please download or clone the companion repository. Thanks to the wonderful renv package, simply running renv::restore() before executing any lines of code in your source-code editor should ensure that all required packages are automatically available to you.

If you’ve never cloned a repository, please watch the video embedded below.²

API Keys

You’ll need to obtain valid API keys to use the tidycensus and cancensus libraries.

• Instructions for obtaining a CensusMapper API key (to access cancensus data)—and storing it on your system—can be found here.

• Instructions for obtaining an API key from the US Census Bureau—and storing it on your system—can be found here.

Fonts

Please download and install the IBM Plex Sans and Inconsolata typefaces via Google Fonts or by downloading the compressed file embedded below:

fonts.zip

References

Heiss, Andrew. 2024. “Data Visualization with R.” https://datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/.

Scherer, Cédric. 2022. “Graphic Design with ggplot2.” https://rstudio-conf-2022.github.io/ggplot2-graphic-design/.

Wickham, Hadley, Danielle Navarro, and Thomas Lin Pedersen. 2023. “ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis.” https://ggplot2-book.org/.

Wilkinson, Leland. 2005. The Grammar of Graphics. Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-28695-0.

Footnotes

1. Participants should, of course, feel free to use other IDEs (e.g., Positron), environments, or source-code editors to run the material featured in this short course.

2. The video details how to use RStudio to easily clone a repository hosted on GitHub. There are, of course, other ways to clone Git repositories — inclusive of the command line.