Data journalism is increasingly used to help the public understand complex scientific and social issues, but what makes an effective data visualization?  What techniques should we employ to create compelling graphs and tell better stories?  Using environmental data, we'll examine a set of real-world figures and graphs to identify techniques commonly used in data journalism and explore how to thoughtfully incorporate them into our work. Then we will learn to recreate them responsibly and reproducibly using the R Programming language.  

While this themed session focuses on environmental data, the concepts here are transferrable and applicable to a wide range of subjects where data plays an important role in understanding research outcomes, information diffusion, media literacy, etc.

This workshop is part of the Earth Week Data Jam hosted by the Libraries' Research Data and Digital Scholarship unit.