Week 7: Effective Use of Color
Hello all,
Week 7 is upon us, and we will be doing a deeper dive into color theory this week. In particular, we are going to focus on the use of qualitative colormaps to differentiate between a small number of categorical data, or to accent particular findings. In contrast to the sequential colormaps we have used for mapping or to otherwise represent continuous data, uses of color for qualitative purposes or for accenting requires a bit more fine-tuning and use of the ggplot color functions. Qualitative color scales are also much more challenging to make accessible to people with different types of colorblindness, so we will talk more about the different types of color perception that people have and how to make qualitative plots that are friendlier.
The main reading assignment is Chapter 4 of Fundamentals and Chapter 4 of Storytelling, but an additional article from Okabe and Ito on color vision deficiency will be included for the curious.
Check out module 4 for more information on the reading assignments.
Data Story 4 is available. The dataset for this story is richer and more complex than for previous assignments and as a result the problem is more open ended. The other data stories were open ended but because of their nature you could find very good starting points in the media (i.e. they covered issues that have been written about substantially). This data story is about factors driving airbnb revenue in NYC. I think it is a little bit more difficult than previous data stories, so I will include in my lecture notes some code that uses this dataset as an example. It may require more EDA to come up with a good story, and some careful thought to come up with good ideas. To balance the workload, the next two weeks won’t have the discussion assignments.
Thanks,
Sincerely,
George