June 15 – 16, 2015
Sarah Reber, Professor of Public Policy, UCLA Luskin School of Public Affairs
This mini-course provides a practical introduction to data visualization (or, more prosaically, “making graphs”). Students will learn how to use data visualization to conduct research and to communicate findings accurately and effectively. Instruction is conveyed primarily through examples. Students will also learn how to implement (some of) these techniques in Stata and have opportunities to complete in-class and out-of-class exercises to practice the techniques.
The course will cover the following topics:
- Graphing for research versus graphing for persuasion and presentation
- Introduction to visual perception
- How to approach data visualization
- General principles for data visualization
- Choosing the right type of graph
- Best practices in general and for specific types of graphs
- Specific graph and data types, including o Line/connected/time series
- Bar graphs
- Part-to-whole (pies and alternatives to pies)
- Histograms (and other ways of representing distributions)
- Scatterplots (and other ways of showing correlations)
- Regression coefficients (and other types of marginal effects)