01 — Sociol 232: Visualizing Social Data

Kieran Healy

January 23, 2024

What we’ll
be doing

The mechanics of it

Learning some software; understanding how to tell it what to do.

Useful, practical, powerful.

(At times annoying, because computers are stupid.)

The reasons for it

Thinking about how to picture social data.

Thinking about where social data comes from.

Thinking about its scope, limits, and meaning.

Housekeeping

Course Website

https://visualizingsociety.com

Syllabus, schedule, slides, assignments, examples, contact information, policies.

There’s also a Canvas site where you’ll submit assignments and where some readings will be made available.

How to think about the course

There’s a fair deal on offer

The skills we’ll learn are cumulative

Come to class and keep up with the work and you should be fine

Get up and Running: Install R

The R Project Website

https://www.r-project.org

Install RStudio

The RStudio / Posit Website

https://www.posit.co

Download Problem Set 01

https://www.visualizingsociety.com/

Open it

  • Uncompress the Zip file if that doesn’t happen automatically
  • Double-click the 01-problem-set.Rproj file.
  • RStudio should launch

Try rendering the problem set

Now write the following code

Write this out inside the “code chunk” in your notes.

library(tidyverse)
library(gapminder)

p <- ggplot(data = gapminder, 
            mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, 
                          y = lifeExp))  


p + geom_point()

And render your document

Write this out inside the “code chunk” in your notes.

library(tidyverse)
library(gapminder)

p <- ggplot(data = gapminder, 
            mapping = aes(x = gdpPercap, 
                          y = lifeExp))  


p + geom_point()