From Insights to Visualization

Theory

Suggested Conceptual Reading & Discussion

• Barber, M., and Jeremy C. Pope. (2019). Does Party Trump Ideology? Disentangling Party and Ideology in America. American Political Science Review, 113(1), 38–54.

Code: Live Demo & Hands-on Lab

Student Group Live Demo (Group 4)

• Topic: Filtering Survey Rows & Univariate Charts (boolean masks, .value_counts(), distributions with Altair).
• Review the Live Demo Guidelines & Schedule.

The Data Science Pipeline

Extracting Insights from Observations

Tip

To run Python scripts in VS Code, follow 📘 Running Python Scripts in VS Code.

• Download and open the interactive Python visualization scripts directly in VS Code:
  • Open 05_data_exploration_rows.py and 10_visualization_insights.py from the Course Materials
• Practice creating charts with Altair: defining encodings (x, y, color), adding tooltips, and saving/exporting chart figures.

Application

Start your Research Project Script

• In VS Code, create an exploratory Python script (such as exploration.py or analysis.py) to serve as the foundation for your research project's empirical analysis.
• Begin developing and organizing clean, reproducible code using pandas and Altair that will generate the figures and tables for your paper.

Get Ready for Next Session: Think. Explore. Practice.

Think

• How do your DV and IV relate to each other when examined together? Think about whether your relationship is continuous-by-continuous (scatter plot), categorical-by-continuous (box/bar plot), or categorical-by-categorical (grouped frequency chart).
• What substantive story do your preliminary bivariate figures tell, and does it align with your original hypothesis?
• Suggested Reading: Panish, A. R. (2025). Informed or Overwhelmed? Disentangling the Effects of Cognitive Ability and Information on Public Opinion. British Journal of Political Science, 55, 1-24. - Highlights modern data visualization standards in political science for presenting survey interaction effects and group differences clearly.

Explore

• Exploratory Visualizations with Altair: Review bivariate charting techniques in Altair (scatter plots, grouped bars, color/size encodings) and explore the Altair Bivariate Visualizations Gallery to prepare for Milestone 3.

Practice

• Export your two Altair figures as images and integrate them with accompanying text into your Typst manuscript.
• Complete Milestone 3 - Exploration (Due Friday, Nov 20 at 23:59 via email).