A Class notes

A.1 Ask me questions

Feel free to email me with questions about any aspect of the course, or problem you are having with the work, but you must include your current best answer to your own question, along with what you’ve tried so far (and why it didn’t work).

It is easiest for me to help you with your project, either in person (see timetable) or by email if you provide a full project (e.g. the data and code as well as the output you have so far) as well as a project rationale stating what it is you are trying to do

This is helpful guidance on posing specific coding questions https://stackoverflow.com/help/how-to-ask

A.2 Terminology: ‘Raw data’

Data before any processing has been done. Usually these means that the individual responses which create the data are recorded

The opposite is cleaned data (once it has been processed) and then after that summary data (in which responses are collapsed across individuals or into groups)

A.3 What should I do if my visualisation uses a new library or package?

Ideally your code should specify all the libraries it uses. These are known as “dependencies.” If you use an usual library it may require specific downloading to your computer, meaning that your code won’t run on computers that don’t have it downloaded. There are ways of managing this, but we haven’t covered these in the course (google “docker” or “conda” or “reproducible computational environments”). As long as your code indicates what you have installed (e.g. it includes a line like

library(fancyplotslibrary)

at the beginning, don’t worry about it

Remember - if you use a new library, your code will not run for anyone else until they install it.