Data Visualization (Spring 2026 PMAP 8551/4551) News

Class website future

Hello everyone!

Week 15 FAQs

You made it! Congratulations!

Week 14 FAQs

Oh man, I have no idea. This was bedeviling, and I think I discovered a bug.

Week 13 FAQs

So many of you asked some variation of this! You learned about visualizing time with column charts, with heatmaps, with stripes, with lines, and so on. Many of you are…

Week 12 FAQs

Absolutely! ggplotly() works with geom_sf(). Here’s a regular static map:

Week 11 FAQs

Yeah, glue() is wonderful!

Week 10 FAQs

Great work with exercise 10 and following the Urban Institute style guide! That process is completely normal and good practice for any future jobs you might have. Most…

Grades, zeroes, and ✓−s in the gradebook

Mini project 1 feedback

Week 9 FAQs

A couple weeks ago there was a related FAQ about all R packages, and I gave you some helpful strategies for finding R packages in general.

Week 8 FAQs

In the example, I use paste0() to build text. The paste() function takes text and variables and concatenates them together into one string or character variable.

Week 7 FAQs

There are tens of thousands of R packages, and there’s no good way of knowing what’s out there. A lot of that is because packages are often created for some really specific…

Week 6 FAQs

Yes! The answer keys for every assignment are on iCollege under “Content” and they appear immediately after submitting an assignment. You should download these and compare…

Week 5 FAQs

Yep. Leland Wilkinson—the guy who invented the idea of the grammar of graphics and wrote the literal The Grammar of Graphics book—was actually a semi-cofounder of Tableau.…

Week 4 FAQs

Week 3 FAQs

Week 2 FAQs

FAQs about LLMs, R, and this class

So in the previous announcement post, I (repeatedly and forcefully!) made the point that LLMs are bad and dangerous for learning to code. You have to know what you’re doing…

LLMs are bad and dangerous for learning how to code in this class

In the first week of class, I had you read an article about how ChatGPT is philosophical “bullshit”, as well as this other post about AI and LLMs in this class.

Making cleaner, nicer Quarto documents

Copy, paste, and tweak

Learning programming is a little different from learning other skills or materials. In other classes you’ve taken, you read articles or textbooks, take notes on them, talk…

Week 1 tips and FAQs

How to ask for help

When working through the examples or exercises, you will get stuck. It’s inevitable.

First day of class!

Building community on Discord

The most common question I get from students before the class is this:

Important R stuff

From reading the syllabus you’ll notice that we’re using R in this class. R is free (!!), and highly sought after by employers, but it has a little bit of an initial…

Announcements and updates

Over the course of the semester, I’ll be sending you lots of updates and announcements and FAQs.

Welcome to class!

Hello everyone!