Peer review from Maria S-C

Hi Cameron (and @datalorax),

From a fellow Star Wars fan, your project was incredibly fun to review and made me excited to have more fun with my own data viz. process.

Areas of strengths: (1) Your code and commenting style were incredibly consistent throughout the Rmd, making my job as a reviewer and my experience as someone trying to replicate your work much simpler. Whenever I had a question about your visualization, I could easily trace what you did by going back through your code. (2) The starship data points, the standard error “wings”, and lightsaber bars were each awesome. These added visual components connect the data content to the message you are communicating. (3) The way you set up each of your visualizations brings the viewer to that place, for example, the starships viz. really works with the ships being plotted onto a starry sky; the lightsaber viz. makes you think of the characters who might use them. These backdrops set the stage for further interpreting the data. (4) As someone who finds annotations challenging, I particularly commend you for your last visualization where you plotted all of your data and text onto the plot rather than through axis labels or via legends.

Things I learned: There were many things I learned from your script – too many to name. Here are a few: I learned how to turn a column that is a list into a non-list; this would have helped me in some of my own data visualizations. I forgot you can pipe data into a tibble, also a great tip. In general, I found myself reading through your code and thinking “that is how I could have done that!” I also had no idea that people have developed themed geoms. Your project has sent me down a rabbit hole, in a good way. Thank you for sharing your work.

Visualization 1: (1) Star Wars fans might wonder if the men in your sample are only from the dark side of the force, given the red color, and if the women in your sample are only from the light side—for everyone else, the colors are fun! (2) Second change might be shifting your title for clarity to say “Average age by gender.”

Visualization 2: (1) I’m conflicted about my feedback for this one. First, I will say that I rendered the visualization and then re-read through your code to see how you created this awesome visualization. After reading back through, I now understand why the ships don’t line up vertically on the x-axis (i.e., because the wings are error bars). However, I will say that I initially thought this graph was visualizing the average length (i.e., the biggest ship is approximately 40 meters), not that the biggest ship was on average 40 meters with error bars. So, I am wondering if other viewers will also misinterpret the length of the ship’s wings. Could you indicate in a subtitle that the ship wings represent standard error? (2) My second suggestion could potential mitigate some of the confusion. I would suggest that you annotate each ship and remove the x-axis and y-axis tics altogether. For example, you could say “Yacht Averages 41 meters” plotted onto the visualization.

Visualization 3: (1) Could you plot only the planets from the original trilogy, since you have also identified them in your data by creating a new variable? This would help the clarity for the reader. You could then update your title to indicate “Distance of Original Trilogy Star Wars Planets…” or “Distance of Select Star Wars Planets” to note that you haven’t plotted every planet in the dataset. I made a few small tweaks in your code with font size to try to see your data better. (2 ) I like what you did with underlying the solar system for a comparison – genius! I can’t see Earth, Mars or Jupiter very well -- are there supposed to be actual points or just text? Also, if there are supposed to be data points to represent Earth, Mars, and Jupiter, could you plot them in different colors from the Star Wars planets?

Again -- congrats on these unique and fun visualizations!

Best, Maria

camkay / edld610_catd_finalproject

Peer review from Maria S-C #1