Space

Content for week of Monday, July 12, 2021–Friday, July 16, 2021

Readings

  • Chapter 10 in Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art1
  • Chapter 7 in Kieran Healy, Data Visualization2

It looks like this is a lot of reading, but lots of these are short videos or tweets or interactive websites, so don’t worry!

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.)

  • How can you know if a map projection is truthful or misleading?
  • What’s wrong (or not wrong) with using points on maps? Choropleths? Lines?

Other resources

Check out this post where someone used ggplot2 and sf to create fancy city map-based art that she printed for a friend. You can do similar things after this session!

In addition to the example for this session, you can check out this tutorial on using the sf package to create maps. It shows how to include fancy map stuff like a north arrow and scale bar.

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. Alberto Cairo, The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication (Berkeley, California: New Riders, 2016). ↩︎

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