Project tips + resources

The project is very open ended. For instance, when creating compelling visualizations of your data in R, there is no limit on what tools or packages you may use. You do not need to visualize all of the data at once. A single high-quality visualization will receive a much higher grade than a large number of poor-quality visualizations.

Before you finalize your write-up, hide the code with the option echo: false. Suppress warnings and messages with the options warning: false and message: false.

Finally, pay attention to details in your write-up and presentation. Neatness, coherence, and clarity will count.

Tips

  • Ask questions if any of the expectations are unclear.

  • Code: In your write-up, your code should be hidden (echo: false) so that your document is neat and easy to read. However, your source document should include all your code so that I can reproduce the results you presented by rendering your .qmd file.

    • Exception: If you want to highlight something specific about a piece of code, you’re welcome to show that portion.

  • Merge conflicts will happen, issues will arise, and that’s fine! Commit and push often, and ask questions when stuck.

  • Make sure each team member is contributing, both in terms of quality and quantity of contribution (we will be reviewing commits from different team members).

    • All team members are expected to contribute equally to the completion of this assignment, and group assessments will be given at its completion. Anyone judged not to have contributed sufficiently to the final product will have their grade penalized. While team members may have different backgrounds and abilities, it is the responsibility of every team member to understand how and why all code and approaches in the assignment work.

Formatting + communication

Suppress code and warnings

  • Include the following in the YAML of your index.qmd to suppress all code, warnings, and other messages.
execute:
  echo: false
  warning: false
  message: false

Headers

Use headers to clearly label each section. Make sure there is a blank line before each header. Use appropriate header levels.

References

Include all references in a section called “References” at the end of the report. This course does not have specific requirements for formatting citations and references. Optional: Use Quarto’s citation support for generating your references. See Citations & Footnotes on the Quarto documentation for more on that.

Appendix

If you have additional work that does not fit or does not belong in the body of the report, you may put it at the end of the document in a section called “Appendix”. The items in the appendix should be properly labeled. The appendix should only be for additional material. The reader should be able to fully understand your report without viewing content in the appendix. We will not grade your appendix.

Resize figures

Resize plots and figures, so you have more space for the narrative. Resize individual figures: Set fig-width and fig-asp in chunk options, e.g.,

#| echo: fenced
#| label: code-cell-label
#| fig-width: 5
#| fig-asp: 0.628

Replace code-cell-label with a meaningful label and the width and aspect ratio with values appropriate for your write-up.

Resize all figures: Include the fig-width and fig-asp options in the YAML header as shown below:

execute:
  fig-width: 5
  fig-asp: 0.628

Replace the width and aspect ratio values with values appropriate for your write-up.

Arranging plots

Arrange plots in a grid, instead of one after the other. This is especially useful when displaying plots for exploratory data analysis and to check assumptions.

The patchwork package makes it easy to arrange plots in a grid.