IMPRS-gBGC workshop 'Data Visualisation: Principles and Applications'
1. Time & place
The training is conducted over 2 full days.
November, 27-28, 2014 (Thursday - Friday)
MPI for Biogeochemistry, seminar room B0.002
Approximately timetable
Start: 9.00 am
Coffee break: 11 am
Lunch break: 12.30 pm
Coffee break: 3 pm
End: 5 pm
2. The instructor
Dr. Rick Scavetta from Science Craft
3. The class
3.1 Description
prepared by Science Craft
This two-day workshop enables the participants to effectively create figures that add impact to their publications. The workshop is divided into two one-day modules: Principles and Applications. On the first day, the principles module will focus on topics such as understanding the purpose of a figure, choosing the most appropriate plot type, and the science of perception. On the second day, the applications module will focus on the practical implementation of data visualisation principles using the R statistical programming environment. The Grammar of Graphics plotting concept will be introduced. In this technique, we begin to understand quantitative plots like written sentences. By rearranging grammatical elements in text (punctuation, clause order), and using specific words (adjectives, adverbs), we can subtly control the message we want to communicate. The same holds true for data visualisations. Here, we rearrange layers and use specific geoms to achieve the message we want to communicate with our data visualisations.
The workshop material includes a reference book prepared by Rick.
3.2 Preparation
Participants are asked to provide a simple visualisation of their own results that will be used as a teaching example during the first day of the workshop. To take full advantage of the Applications module on the second day, participants should already be proficient with R i.e. they should understand data types, importing/exporting data, creating functions and using packages, plus R-specific programming functions, e.g. the plyr and reshape2 packages, and the base-package plot functions.
You can learn these skills in the R basics course offered on October 08, 2014.
Students should bring their own computers with the following cross-platform software pre-installed.
- R – v3.00 or later >> www.r-project.org
- RStudio – v0.98 or later >> http://rstudio.org/download/desktop
3.3 Contact
For further details on the content of the course, the instructor can be contacted directly:
- Dr. Rick Scavetta, rick.scavetta@science-craft.com
For logistic matters (including registration issues), please contact the IMPRS office.
4. Registration
Click here to register before November 13, 2014.
The number of participants for this workshop is limited to 12. If the course is already full, and you want to participate, please sign up anyway. This way we know how big the demand is and when to offer the next course.
5. Feedback
10 of 12 participants filled in the survey in the end of the workshop. The survey results can be seen here. Statistics and statements should not be taken as an exhaustive or exclusive list.