Mapping data to graphics

Content for week of Monday, June 14, 2021–Friday, June 18, 2021

Readings

Questions to reflect on

(Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking.)

  • Why is it important to visualize variables and data?
  • What does it mean to map data to graph aesthetics?
  • What data was mapped to which aesthetics in Rosling’s video?

Other resources

This tutorial by Cédric Scherer is an excellent demonstration of the grammar of graphics and the sequential nature of building up a plot layer-by-layer.

Slides

The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:


  1. Claus E. Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization (Sebastopol, California: O’Reilly Media, 2018), https://clauswilke.com/dataviz/. ↩︎

  2. Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), http://socviz.co/. ↩︎