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:

2014-01-26:

Read, watch, peruse before class:

During class:

  • Bad Graphs of the Day
  • Triage git trauma
  • Strategies & suggestions for Blogpost assignments
  • Data is always ugly (1 of inf)

After class:

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:

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:

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:

During class:

Discuss issues with text, strings, unicode, labels, &c.

2014-02-19: color

Read, watch, peruse before class:

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:

2014-03-18: (spring break)

During class:

2014-03-24: Gentle introduction to D3

Read, watch, peruse before class:

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:

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:

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