My Agenda
Daily Organization
The data structure for each class meeting below is a class section with a rough plan for what we intend to do with our meeting time; and other sections (not necessarily all of them every time) for items to read before (or watch in the case of video links); due in class for assignments that are due at the start of class (because they will be the subject of discussion in class) and do after class.
Three hours a week is probably a reasonable amount of time for a developer to spend in meetings, rather than coding, reading, or doing other stuff. Happily, we have "three" hours of class time. We will use some of this time like development meetings: going over specifications (assignments), making tasks (writing down acceptance criteria), having detailed code reviews of various forms, and discussing blocking issues and potential solutions.
You should be prepared at any class to give a very brief summary of your status on all the projects you're working on. Knowing and alerting others that you are stuck on something is vital.
2014-01-22:
During class:
Overview, principles, goals, objectives.
After class:
- Make a Github account if you don't already have one
- Fork the repo — your blog posts will be in the form of pull requests
- Add various blogs to your aggregator
- Git intro
- Git workflow for beginners
- Git branching game!
2014-01-26:
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Gelman and Unwin (recommended: responses to it)
- Yann LeCun on Data Science
- Gelman on Schutt / Data Science
- Stan Manual ch. 7, "Model Building as Software Development"
During class:
- Bad Graphs of the Day
- Triage git trauma
- Strategies & suggestions for Blogpost assignments
- Data is always ugly (1 of inf)
After class:
- Start looking around for graphs (and their backing data) to use for blogpost #1
- cheat with web plot digitizer
- "Learn" Markdown
- Glance at the format of jekyll "posts" for gh-pages
2014-01-29:
During class:
(Malecki out)
Recommended instead
New York Open Statistical Programming January Meetup:
Obtaining, Scrubbing, and Exploring Data at the Command Line (Conveniently at the same time as our class)
2014-02-03: Making graphics; formats and tools
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Yau, ch. 1,2,3,9
- Gelman&Hill, Appendix B
- Climate change, crowbars, and strikeouts
- Heer et al, Visualization Zoo (note: fixed link)
Due before/in class:
trial blogpost introducing yourself
During class:
- Graphics display implementation details. Yes, you probably need to know more than nothing about formats, rendering engines, and the DOM.
2014-02-05: Graphics theory
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Grammer of Graphics ch. 1,2,5 (SpringerLink)
- Heer et al, Visualization Zoo (note: fixed link)
- D3 paper
During class:
- Discuss non-blogpost projects:
- teams (?)
- specifications
- iteration plans
- proofs of concept,
- current status
- evaluation criteria.
2014-02-10: Data are ugly
Read, watch, peruse before class:
Due before/in class:
Iteration plan with objective and specific tasks for 3 weeks.
During class:
Strategies for dealing with ugly data; "the 'csv' api"
2014-02-12: More statistical graphics theory
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Gelman and Hill, TBD
2014-02-17: Type, Typesetting, Typography, and Strings
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Spolsky, The Absolute Minimum Every Software Developer Absolutely, Positively Must Know About Unicode and Character Sets (No Excuses!)
- Shaw, The (mostly) true story of helvetica and the new york city subway (The book is excellent, by the way, as is the documentary Helvetica)
- Strings – Dive into Python3
- Shady Characters (blog and book both recommended)
During class:
Discuss issues with text, strings, unicode, labels, &c.
2014-02-19: color
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- HCL color space
- Semantically resonant colors
- Color naming
- HCL in R
- Quantitative and Ordinal scales in D3
- Motley
During class:
- discuss some graphs with color issues
- discuss color issues for class projects
2014-02-24: Data are ugly
Read, watch, peruse before class:
2014-02-26: APIs and data interchange
Read, watch, peruse before class:
some API doc; R and Python tools for data wrangling and interfaces
During class:
discuss I/O, shortcuts, and modeling
After class:
2014-03-03: blogposts review; R packaging
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Yau, ch. 4,5,7
Due before/in class:
blogpost 1 due. Submit a pull request and be ready to discuss challenges you had and how you solved them.
During class:
Build an R package for a project
2014-03-05: Nominally Animation; more APIs and data interchange
Read, watch, peruse before class:
Due before/in class:
Iteration plan. What was left undone, objective and key results for next three weeks.
During class:
Do grouped/stacked plot of estimated party ID in Lattice
2014-03-10: Two refactoring stories
During class:
- Lightning talks
- Refactor old exploratory and analysis code to R-package pattern; bugfix using testthat.
- after: Data science workflow
2014-03-12: Getting there from here
Read, watch, peruse before class:
2014-03-24: Gentle introduction to D3
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Murray, Interative data Visualization for the Web (O'Reilly Safari)
During class:
js, json, svg; tips and tricks
2014-03-26: maps
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Yau, ch. 8
- Gelman&Hill, ch. TBD
- Recommended: Wayfinding
2014-04-02: Reproducibility and Replication
Read, watch, peruse before class:
During class:
- discuss reproducible research, publishing replication data, versioning, &c
2014-04-07: Trellis/Lattice
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Yau ch.6
- Sarkar book (SpringerLink)
During class:
Discuss problems Lattice solves, use cases, implementations, relevance to blogposts or projects
2014-04-09: Pablo Barberá, working paper
Due before/in class:
blogpost #2
During class:
2014-04-14: Histograms are totally simple, right?
Read, watch, peruse before class:
2014-04-16: ggplot2 in some depth
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- gglot2 book (SpringerLink)
- ggplot2 doc web site
- ggplot in Python
2014-04-21: Bayesian logistic and item-response-family models
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Gelman & Hill ch. 6, 14.3
2014-04-23: model checking, displays, and uncertainty
Read, watch, peruse before class:
- Gelman&Hill ch. 8
2014-04-28: class and project reviews
2014-04-30: project reviews
2014-05-05: project reviews
Due before/in class:
Blogpost #3