Assignment 1

Visualization and critique

Select a data visualization and write a (roughly) 1000 word critique of the visualization based on the five qualities of great visualizations:¹ You also need to provide a short paragraph summarizing how you would improve it (no plot needed – a couple of sentences will suffice).

• Is it truthful?
• Is it functional?
• Is it beautiful?
• Is it insightful?
• Is it enlightening?

Remember that to critique something does not mean to tear it down or find all the flaws. Critiques should include both positive and negative aspects - what did the author do well? What are the weaknesses of the visualization? How could the truthfulness of the visualization be improved?

Finding a visualization

Some good resources for finding visualizations to critique:

• Academic journals/books in your field which include graphs or charts (you don’t have to find some super-duper high tech interactive graph on the web)
• r/dataisbeautiful
• Nathan Yau’s Flowing Data blog
• FiveThirtyEight or The Upshot - or really any other data journalism site

Submission details

All work will be performed inside a version-controlled GitHub repo. Create your project repo by going to this link on github classroom

Be sure to include a link to the original visualization in your critique. Submit your critique as a Markdown formatted document that can be read directly in the repo on GitHub. Write either in the original .md file or write it as an R Markdown document rendered using the github_output format.

The repo should be ’nice’ in that you need good folder and file name conventions, nice headings for paragraphs, and it’s easily readable.

Note: your assignment has example assignments and descriptions to help you understand the assignment prompt.