Surveys and qualitative data

Due by 11:59 PM on Monday, October 23, 2017

Complete these tasks in an R Markdown file and e-mail me a PDF of the final compiled document. Here’s the typical starter file. As always, I recommend saving it within an RStudio project. Make sure the final output is as clean and warning/message free as possible.

Task 1: Reflection memo

This memo is different. Write ≈100 words about the the assigned readings for this week. You can use some of the prompt questions there if you want:

• Why is qualitative data difficult to visualize?
• Why are word clouds so problematic? When is (not) okay to use them?

Then, write ≈400 words exploring a few of these summative questions:

• What is truth?
• How do we find truth?
• Are facts truth?
• What’s the difference between content and form?
• Does beauty matter when describing truth?
• How does any of this philosophical humanities stuff relate to data visualization?

Task 2: Text visualization

Work through this tutorial on visualizing text in Harry Potter with the tidytext package (which you’ll need to install with the RStudio “Packages” panel). You don’t need to understand all the code (it even uses some for loops!),⊕ Really, all you’re doing here is copying/pasting stuff into an Rmd file, so it shouldn’t take too long. Try to understand what’s happening with the code though.

but it’ll give you the gist of working with words. We’ll cover this in more detail in class on Tuesday.

Include the graph of the 10 most common words in the 7 Harry Potter books and the scatterplot of frequencies from the tutorial in your knitted document.