Data Visualization (Spring 2026 PMAP 8551/4551) News

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!