Mini-Project 3: Building a Personal Quarto Webpage

Overview

We will create our own personal quarto webpages to give you a forum for showing your data science portfolio, featuring projects from SDS 264 in addition to things you’ve worked on in other classes, independently, etc.

We will follow the excellent set of instructions prepared by Samantha Csik and others as part of the Bren School of Environmental Science & Management’s Master of Environmental Data Science (MEDS) program.

I have found success starting at the top and working my way carefully through the steps outlined. I cannot emphasize this enough: be sure to NOT speed through the steps, but follow even the small, subtle suggestions, and stop and appreciate the useful insights given at various points in the process! Continue all the way through the end of the website!

Big Picture

  • We’ll create .qmd files filled with the content of our website, styling the content with markdown (same as Rmd files).
  • We’ll render the .qmd files into .html files that we can host on a web server like GitHub Pages.
  • Most people will create and publish a personal website using GitHub that is named username.github.io; in that case, you’ll have a website folder and a folder on your own computer both named username.github.io (e.g. proback.github.io).

Specifics

You will publish a personal quarto webpage that contains:

Home page:

Basic information about yourself and at least one image (it could be a picture of you or something else), as well as a menu bar.

Tab 1 on the menu bar:

Your work from Mini-Project 1 on text analysis. You should clean up your original submission to make it suitable for display (e.g., hide or collapse unnecessary code, nice section headers, nicely formatted text, clean and well-labeled plots, etc.). You can decide if you’d like to display some or all of your code, collapse those sections, or just link to code on GitHub.

Tab 2 on the menu bar:

You will produce a page of 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 tab:

  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 that acknowledges 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.

Additional tabs as desired (optional)

Rubric and Submission

Check out this rubric for Mini-Project 3.

Mini-Project 3 must be submitted on moodle by 11:00 PM on Fri Nov 21. All I need is a url for your webpage, which should then have a link to your R code in GitHub. If you choose not to make your webpage public at this time, please add me as a collaborator to your GitHub repository so that I can see your code and generate your webpage.

Examples

Here is a pretty basic example that I put together. I’m hoping you’ll put together something more impressive – taking advantage of features in quarto to create a look that you’re excited about and an organization and layout that cleanly highlights your good work.

The following Data Science sites were created with Quarto:

  • https://bcheggeseth.github.io/
  • https://allisonhorst.github.io/
  • https://samanthacsik.github.io/
  • https://www.andreashandel.com/
  • https://deepshamenghani.quarto.pub/dmenghani/ [published with Quarto pubs]

Code Examples [if you see something you like in the sites above, try and find their github repo]:

  • https://github.com/bcheggeseth/bcheggeseth.github.io
  • https://github.com/allisonhorst/allisonhorst.github.io
  • https://github.com/samanthacsik/samanthacsik.github.io
  • https://github.com/andreashandel/andreashandelwebsite

Additional Information

Quarto Website Resources: