Module 11: Tufte Visualizations

Hi everyone!

This week we learned about Dr. Tufte and his visualization methodologies. 

Tufte explains the fundamental principles of analytical design to be showing comparisons, causality, multiple variables at once, visual evidence through modes like color, documentation of data, and the actual content. I found his discussion on not having pre-specified ideas for visualizing data to be incredibly insightful because we should be choosing our visualizations based on what the analysis of data shows us instead of forcing a visualization type for a dataset.

I chose to recreate Dr. Piwek's marginal histogram scatter plot based on the faithful eruptions dataset.




















I found ggMarginal to be a super cool function that allowed me to bring two types of graphs into one. The histograms on top of the scatterplot make it easier to see shorter and longer waiting times have larger eruptions rather than the medium waiting times. 

I enhanced Dr. Piwek's graph by adding a fill color of red that communicates these eruption duration times are alarming which incorporates Dr. Tufte's principal of visual evidence. For clarity, I added axis titles and a main title. 

Check this out in GitHub!

-Ramya's POV

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