Web design and visualization

13 April 2026

This week we return to questions of visualization, style, and accessibility for data visualizations and websites.

Reading

• Kieran Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction
  • Chapter 7: Draw Maps
  • Chapter 8: Refine your plots
• Claus Wilke, Fundamentals of Data Visualization
  • Chapter 4: Color scales
  • Chapter 19: Common pitfalls of color use
  • Chapter 20: Redundant coding
• Nicola Rennie, The Art of Data Visualization with ggplot2: The TidyTuesday Cookbook (CRC Press, 2025), https://nrennie.rbind.io/art-of-viz/.
  • Pick a chapter to read through. Follow along with the code and/or get inspiration on the types of visualizations you can make.
• Nicola Rennie, How to create a more accessible line chart.

Assignment

• Practice making maps with Healy, Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction and with your own data in a Quarto document.
• Practice with networks using the SNiGB associates data. Download this Quarto document as a starting point. Make sure to put the document in your r-notes RStudio project and have the SNiGB data, which can be found in this GoogleDrive.

Activities

• Go over making networks with SNiGB
• Data visualization
• Accessibility

Resources

See Resources: Digital accessibility and Resources: Colors with ggplot2.

• Web Accessibility Initiative
• Accessibility at Virginia Tech
• TLOS Digital Accessibility
• Achim Zeileis and Paul Murrell, “Coloring in R’s Blind Spot,” 2023, https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.04918.