Mini-Project 1: Maps

Overview

You will produce choropleth maps illustrating two different characteristics – one numeric and one categorical – that have been measured for each US state (you can choose to exclude Alaska and Hawaii), like we did in the “Creating Informative Maps” activity. Just as we found state-level data from both a vaccine data set and the poliscidata package, you should find your own state-level data that is interesting to you.

A few additional details for this mini-project:

  1. You should create two versions of each plot – one that is static and one that is interactive.

  2. Be sure to include a note on your plots with your data source.

  3. You should be able to merge your state-level data with the state mapping data sets we used in class.

  4. Be sure you label your plot well and provide a description of what insights can be gained from each static plot. For one of your static plots, this should be in the form of alt-text, using the “Four Ingredient Model” in the article from class.

  5. Check out this rubric for Mini-Project 1.

Submission and Timeline

Mini-Project 1 must be submitted on moodle by 11:00 PM on Fri Sep 20. You should submit your two static plots, along with descriptions and alt-text, in a pdf document. For your interactive plots, just submit a GitHub link where I can see your code that would produce a nice html document. Then, in Mini-Project 2, I will ask you to build a webpage where you will link to these interactive html pages.