📑 Module 2 Introduction-2

To-Do Date: Tue Feb 07 2023 07:59:59 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time)

Displaying Data

A timeplot of musculoskeletal injuries per 10,000 full-time employees showing that the number of injuries for non-Amazon warehouses and private businesses has remained fairly stable around 200 and 100, respectively from 2015 to 2019 while the number of injuries for Amazon warehouses started significantly higher above 500 and rose sharply in 2017 to over 1000 where it remained through 2019.
Source: Business Insider Amazon Injuries Article Links to an external site.

In the next two modules, you’ll learn about ways to summarize and display data. These summaries and displays will allow you to see trends or patterns in your data as well as identify possible outliers. This process is called exploratory data analysis and the results of this analysis are sometimes referred to as descriptive statistics. In Week 2 in particular, we focus on the displays while next week we will dive into the summary statistics.

Creating meaningful summaries and displays allow us to communicate complex information to others and tell a compelling story using data. Consider the information shared and story told using the line graph to the right.

The type of descriptive statistics run depends heavily on the type of data. As a reminder,

Categorical (Qualitative) Data: Consists of names or labels that are not numbers representing counts or measurements, places subject into one of several groups or categories.
Numeric (Quantitative) Data: Consists of numbers representing counts or measurements.

Learning Goals

At the end of this module, students will be able to:

Select appropriate displays for categorical and quantitative data.
Interpret displays for categorical and quantitative data, including finding percentages, frequencies, and summary statistics from a given display.
Use alt text and color appropriately to create accessible displays.
Describe the distribution of a numeric variable given a histogram, stemplot, or dotplot.

Resources

You can find help for creating displays and calculating descriptive statistics using technology on our course Canvas page. Here are some great resources in terms of finding interesting graphs:

NYT’s What’s Going On in This Graph Links to an external site. - a great resource from the NYT where you get graphs with LOTS of variables being displayed with a chance to notice & wonder along with students from across the world.
Graphs in the World Links to an external site.- an instagram account managed by Marian Andersen where she posts interesting graphs (mostly timeplots).
Slow Reveal Graphs Links to an external site. - A website with graphs of all types.