Critique to Dana Westley Visualisation

[jonathanecm]

Critique to Dana Westley

I used this GitHub repository to make the critique about your visualization: Your Final Project Repo

As a visual representation visual representation of President Trump’s sentiment about Social Issues expressed in twits, your visualizations enable communication, analysis, discovery, and exploration.
I like the way you used position, size, and colors to encode your data. Similarly, I believe your visualizations accomplish the first principle exposed in class; they are truthful. The data projected in the plots seems to represent possible terms used by President Trump in his first month of administration. The numbers seems to add up, and there is not the appearance that the visualizations are hiding data points or trends, that you are self-deceived, or dishonest.

They are functional, as they constitute an accurate depiction of the data, and they are built in a way that allows meaningful interpretation based on the data presented. For example, showing the frequency for each term allows making quick comparisons between the most mentioned terms or the sentiment of each term. Similarly, plotting negative and positive terms with different positions and colors allows quick comparison between the two types of terms. A suggestion is rather than having a different graph for _gender or religion using facets, a Shiny app, or another way to gather all this information into one easily-to-explore visualization. Something that was not clear in the gender or religion plots was the meaning of 0 or negative mentions. Finally, in the case of the line plots, I would stretch the x-axis to enhance the visualization of the trends; maybe using longer ranges for the bins.

I believe that beauty is in simplicity; thus, in my opinion, your visualizations achieve the third principle we learned in class, beauty. In the sense that your visualizations are attractive, intriguing, and aesthetically pleasing for its intended audience general public and even scientist. The black and gray give simplicity and sophistication to the plots while allowing clear representation of the data. On the other hand, while avoiding colors might force the reader to a more rational exploration of the data, you are also losing the possibility of using color to produce in the reader a more emotional connection with the story you are trying to tell. An extra modification you might want to consider is elimination the grid background. I think they will look even better. Furthermore, the simple appearance of your plots makes it easier find the connection of the projected data with the story presented; the discourse features of President Trump.  
Your visualizations are also insightful since they reveal evidence about President Trump’s characteristic discourse that we would have a hard time seeing otherwise. Thus the plots allow Knowledge-building. The new knowledge your plots reveal can open the door for more discoveries or inferences about the way the President speaks about different issues.

Finally, the plots are enlightening because they have the potential to change people’s perspective about the way that the political leadership, in this case Trump, are talking about important social issues. In conclusion, a nice topic and way to present your finding!