Session 9 Reasoning With and Writing About Numbers and Data
A Note on Plans
Our initial plan for this week was to spend time doing field work in Urbana, however, the weather forecast suggests it will be rainy today. As is inevitable with plans, when you make them, something will disrupt their ideal execution. We will switch our plans so that this week we will be in CIF on Tuesday and Thursday and next week we will be outside. Consequently, please come to CIF at our regularly scheduled time this week, and we will discuss our plans for next week on Thursday.
Session Description
For the past few weeks, we’ve focused out time on learning the grammar, structure, and logic of R and RStudio. Now it’s time for us to take a step back and think more about the big picture of our endeavor - how do we make use of the tools and strategies we’re learning to find the story in our data? How do we leverage this story to make persuasive and evocative arguments to diverse stakeholders? This week, we’ll be thinking about two elements of this:
- Tools for leveraging census data.
- Strategies for telling stories using these data.
Before Class
At the beginning of class we’ll ask a few of you to share draft visualizations. Please keep in mind that these do not need to be complete - they can be works in progress. We’ll provide feedback which you can incorporate in your learning process. If you plan on sharing, please come with your visualization ready to be shared on our classroom’s projectors.
Article 1 Section 2 of the U.S. Constitution
Slides
Other Resources
Census Questionnaires (current and historical)