Final project

The purpose of the final project is to apply principles of visual design and technical skills rendering graphics to a topic of your own substantive interests. Student may work individually or in teams of up to three. Students should identify early in the term a research question or topic of substantive importance to themselves, then use the skills developed in this course to design and present a visualization which explains the results. The form of this deliverable can take any number of forms:

• A web site with a substantial visualization component using Plotly and Shiny.
• A github repo with multiple projects and a clear overview, with both a Shiny app and at least two other projects.
• An interactive web page built using R Markdown, Shiny, and/or Tableau.

Expectations are high for this project: you need a clear question you are asking and graphics that address it in a meaningful way. The prompt is open-ended so that you can find something that is relevant to your interests. Of the class topics we cover, you should have plots that have a more challenging aspect to them, such as geographic location, networks, in-depth analysis of some kind, or some other in-depth exploration of your data. Regardless of how you incorporate graphics, there must be at least one plot that is interactive in some way.

We are more than happy to talk at any point about your project and your data!

Deadlines

You will submit a proposal prior to the final project.

Assessment

Your project will be assessed on the following criteria:¹

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

Final Deliverables

Submit final deliverables to your GitHub repo by March 11 at 11:59 pm.

The final deliverables include:

• Visualization: the final product of your project. This could be a Markdown/HTML/PDF file of your research paper, a link to a Shiny app or web page hosting your visualization, etc. If this is located outside of the GitHub repository, make sure to include a link in your README.md file.
• Paper: a 4-6 page paper to supplement your visualization explaining your major design choices. This can be a formal paper or can be incorporated into your webpages in some way. Expected components are:
  • Introduction - an explanation of the problem/research question and the motivation for solving it.
  • Methods - a detailed explanation of the visualization techniques you employed to solve the problem/answer the question.
  • Results/discussion - what has the audience learned from your work? How is the visualization truthful, functional, beautiful, insightful, and/or enlightening?
• Readme: In the repository’s README.md, include a brief project description and instructions for a user to execute your code on their own computer (e.g. what software/packages to install, instructions to obtain data if not included in repo). Aim for your project to be reproducible. If you work with a partner, include a description of which components each of you contributed to the project.
• Code: an implementation of your source code. Make sure your code is well-documented and interpretable to outsiders.

Getting started

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