Weekly Data Viz Coding with #TidyTuesday
Today is Tuesday…which means it’s time for #TidyTuesday!
What is #TidyTuesday? It is a weekly social data visualization project based on the R language and run by the lovely team at RForDataScience. A new dataset is published on GitHub every Tuesday, and people are invited to practice their R data visualization skills and share their creations on social media. It’s a perfect opportunity to apply your skills outside of a classroom or code boot camp setting.
To be honest, #TidyTuesday hasn’t been easy for me to participate in. I frequently got intimidated by the stunning, creative graphs people were posting on Twitter, and I didn’t participate the whole time I was in grad school. Imposter syndrome would kick in, and I felt there was an intense expectation to show the whole world that I was this amazing, experienced data analyst who can create stunning graphs on a whim.
I’ll take last week’s dataset as an example. This dataset (published on Kaggle) was about board games, their ratings, and their reviews. After looking at the data dictionary on the GitHub repository (a first step I always take to see what variables are present in the dataset), I plan in my head a rough image of what I wanted my graph to look like. In this case, I was looking at the number of people who wished for a certain board game (the variable wishing) and thought of creating a bar graph of the top ten most wished games on a scroll similar to Santa’s naughty or nice list.
It seemed great in my head, but putting it into application on RStudio was a different story.
I had a job interview to do that week, and my mental health had hit another low, so I wasn’t able to put in as much time for this graph as I wanted to. I rushed myself, and I was disappointed in the final result…even though I still got a few likes and retweets.
It’s not the best way to approach a weekly social coding project, and I know I’m still at the beginning stage of my data science career with lots of room to learn. I’m just impatient with myself, since I am also job searching at the moment and I have bills to pay.
How do you approach weekly projects like this? (It doesn’t have to be about coding!) Feel free to answer in the comments below.
