LIS 4370 R Programming - Module 3 Post

For this assignment, I will be working with data based off the 2016 Presidential Election. The data consists of three variables: Name, ABC poll results, and CBS poll results. Upon further analysis of the data, one can see that the Name variable is of type character while the poll result variables are of type numeric. 

At the beginning, the data looks something like this:

Immediately, one can see that this data may be a bit easier to read if put into a data frame. 

To place the data into a data frame, one can use the following piece of code:

Executing this piece of code, the data frame will look like the following:

Taking a look at the data frame via str(election), there are 7 observations for the 3 variables.

You can look at the code in its entirety by clicking the GitHub link below:

Module 3 Code

~ Katie

LIS 4317 Visual Analytics - Module 2 Post

For this assignment, I will be using Public Tableau to visualize all Starbucks locations in the USA. Although I did have the opportunity to visualize all Starbucks in the entire world, to keep things simple, I will focus on the USA as the map gets a little hard to read!

Here's a link to the main visualization:

Starbucks Locations by State

The larger the points, the greater number of stores present:

So, the state with least number of stores is Vermont with 11 stores while the state with the greatest number of stores is California with 2,983 stores. This was surprising as I would have thought it would have been Washington state as that was where the coffee shop originated from.

Vermont:

California:

Washington:

While there are only 742 stores in the state, we can still see quite a few Starbucks in the Seattle area.

 

Look! It's the Starbucks at the USF Library!

Thinking about how to make this map more communicative, the first thing that comes to mind is changing the green points to the Starbucks mermaid logo to make it more distinctive. Second, it would be more interesting to see an actual map underneath the points instead of an arbitrary general landscape. It would be neat to see buildings, roads, and other notable landmarks alongside these Starbucks. Third, it might be a good idea to create another viz to color code the states based on which ones are the most populated with Starbucks.

~ Katie

LIS 4317 Visual Analytics - Module 2 (Bonus Practice!!!)

For this practice, I will use Public Tableau to visualize a dataset. I decided to work with a dataset that captured global shark attacks. To keep things simple, I will be looking at United States shark attacks and will strictly look at states that border the Atlantic Ocean, Pacific Ocean, and the Gulf of Mexico. 

For some odd reason, there was a strange number of shark attacks taking place in landlocked states such as Missouri and New Mexico but these attacks were disturbingly unnatural and were often provoked by an individual jumping into a shark tank at a aquarium.

Anyway, the goal of this visualization is to determine the average age of shark attack victims by state.

Below, is a link to the visualization's main page:

Average Age of Shark Attack Victims  

By looking at the color scale of the map, one can see that the darker the color, the older the shark attack victim tends to be. Thus, in states like Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Alabama, the victims tend to be older but technically middle age.

Massachusetts - Average Victim Age: 41

Connecticut - Average Victim Age: 38

Alabama - Average Victim Age: 34

As for states with the youngest victim age, Texas had the youngest age with it being 18 and other states in that similar shade were clustered around that age as well.

Texas:

Georgia:

Virginia:

As for graphic elements that would make the map more communicative, I would think that adding location points of where the victims were attacked to the visualization would make it much more interesting to look at. Additionally, I would like to make the legend I generated in Tableau play a bigger role in the visualization as a whole. Currently, it is pushed off to the side and small. I would prefer that the legend on the map so that viewers do not have to look around for it.

~ Katie

LIS4370 R Programming - Module 2 Assignment

For this post, I will evaluate the following function called myMean as well as the data for this function assignment2.

Here's the code:

Here's the output:

After executing the function, it did indeed work but executing the function on its own will not result it anything meaningful unless you directly call the function and insert the variable you want to see the mean of. In this case, by plugging in assignment2, the myMean function takes the sum of it and divides it by the length of the vector and results in a value of 19.25.

Here is a link to the code via GitHub: 

 Module 2 Code

~ Katie