Assignment 2

Deconstruct, Reconstruct Web Report

Original

Source: Che (2022) College readiness reports

Objective

The main objective of the original data visualization, was to display the ‘worsened indianas college-going decline’ across six years (2015-2020). The main target of this data visualization is precisely the government as, indiana lawmakers were to ‘propose legislative action’ in order to help boost college enrollment rates. Although the main aim of the data visualisation is for the Indiana government, high school students and college students could also be of target.

The visualization chosen had the following three main issues:

• There is no axis or labels which structures the data and explains what is being portrayed without reading the title/website background.

• Hard to interpret where the data begins and ends per year. Does the line end at the dot or the graduation hat for each year?

• The data visualization focuses primarily on the design and colour aspects rather than a professional clean visual which gets to the point. For example the graduation hats are unnecessary as it is clear it is about college students based off of the title and if directed at the government it is not a professional approach.

Reference

• Casey Smith, I.C.C.J.28 (2022) Lawmakers plan response to boost Indiana College-going rate, Indiana Capital Chronicle. Available at: https://indianacapitalchronicle.com/2022/06/28/lawmakers-plan-response-to-boost-indiana-college-going-rate/ (Accessed: April 20, 2023).

Code

The following code was used to fix the issues identified in the original.

library(ggplot2)
graduates <- data.frame(Year = c("2015", "2016", "2017", "2018",                                                  "2019","2020"),
                      Enrollment_Rate = c(65, 64, 63, 61, 59, 53))

plot <- ggplot(data = graduates, aes(x = Year,y = Enrollment_Rate)) +
  geom_bar(stat="identity", width = 0.5, colour = 'grey2', fill ='lightblue2')+
  geom_text(aes(label=Enrollment_Rate ), vjust= 1.6, size=3.5)+
  theme_minimal() + 
  labs(
    title = "Indiana college-going Rate",
    x = 'Year',
    y = "Enrolement Rate (%)",
  )

Data Reference * Che (2022) College readiness reports, CHE. Available at: https://www.in.gov/che/college-readiness-reports/ (Accessed: April 20, 2023).

Reconstruction

The following reconstructed plot fixes the main issues in the original.