From Visualization to Comparisons

Theory

Suggested Conceptual Reading & Discussion

• 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.

Code: Live Demo & Hands-on Lab

Hands-on Lab & Milestone 3 Workshop

• Focus: Visualizing Relationships with Altair (bivariate charts, scatter plots, grouped bars, color encodings) and polishing figures for Milestone 3.

Milestone Check-in

• Milestone 3 - Exploration

Application

Retrospective

In agile project management, a retrospective is a brief meeting held, at the end of an iteration (e.g. sprint), to look for ways to improve the process for the next iteration (Beck, K., et al. 2001).

• 🔗 Retrospective

Let's look ahead!

Tip

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

• Download and open the playground scripts directly in VS Code:
  • Get the Course Materials from the GitHub repository (e.g., playground-polarization.py).

---

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

Think

• Review your cumulative work and instructor feedback across Milestones 1–3. What variable transformations (e.g., handling missing values, creating composite scales, re-categorizing) will be necessary before running regression models in Semester 2?
• How do your initial exploratory findings inform your core theoretical argument?
• Suggested Reading: Pradel, F., Zilinsky, J., Kosmidis, S., & Theocharis, Y. (2024). Toxic speech and limited demand for content moderation on social media. American Political Science Review, 1-18. - Demonstrates meticulous survey data preparation, recoding decisions, and clean empirical presentation.

Explore

• Semester 2 Roadmap: We resume on January 08, 2027 with Module 7 (From Comparisons to Transformations). Student group live demos resume in Session 8 with Group 1 (groups can book a meeting with the instructor to get direction).
• The class should review the Pandas Data Cleaning and Transformation Guide to prepare.

Practice

• Review instructor comments on Milestone 3 - Exploration and consolidate your group's project code repository.
• Explore data wrangling examples in 05_data_exploration_rows.py and 06_data_management_and_scales.py.