Data Visualization and Digital History (Data and DH) is a methods course focused on data manipulation and visualizations. The students are introduced to historical data at all its stages (finding, gathering, manipulating, analyzing, visualizing, and arguing).
Weekly Worksheets
As this is a methodology course, Dr. Mullen assigned weekly worksheets to test the skills we learned about from class and from readings. Each worksheet is crafted to explain the various functions while also providing opportunities to implement those functions on historical data. The links below are to my completed worksheets that are published on RPubs.com.
- Getting Familiar with R
- Data Structures
- Functions
- Basics of ggplot2
- Basic data manipulation with dplyr
- More Data Manipulation
- Exploratory Data Analysis (used the New Nation Votes dataset for exploratory analysis)
- Basic Mapping
Final Visualization Essays
The final project for the course was the creation of three different visualization essays. Each essay should contain narrative text, multiple visualizations with the code to generate the visualization, and citations. The theme of the essays was left open for the student to decide. My first essay utilized the A New Nation Votes dataset that was organized and made available online via the American Antiquarian Society. The second was composed using election data from the Her Hat was in the Ring! dataset. For both of these essays I used mapping as the primary mode of visualization. The final essay focused on text analysis for the Mormon Reformation as recorded in the Journal of Discourses. The ultimate text visualization produced for those sermons were glove word embedded models.
