Graduate student webinar series

In January, the ACS Graduate Student Committee kicked off its webinar series. The first webinar focused on improving data visualization skills to better communicate science across audiences. Presenter Dr. Shantel Martinez is a post-doctoral researcher at Cornell University in Plant Breeding and Genetics. She provided graduate students with common concepts of data visualization, considerations for presenting data in different formats, and an extensive list of resources for students who are both new and well versed in data visualization.

While there are many important factors to consider, the concepts that were addressed in this webinar were simplicity, style, and audience. For example, simplicity allows relationships or conclusions to be shown clearly while the style (e.g., color, line width, etc.) of the figure can help a viewer find connections across topics. The most important component of figure design is the audience. Specifically, it is important to consider how much time and detail the viewer(s) need to understand a specific figure. After providing examples of a dataset that was presented in different formats, Martinez gave several resources for learning more about data visualization. To see all of these resources and access the presentation slides, please visit https://shantel-martinez.github.io/DataViz2020.html.

One of the most popular resources shared was #TidyTuesday on Twitter. TidyTuesday is a weekly data project in R from the R4DS learning community, which shares new forms of visualization and R code for figure generation. Stay tuned as the ACS Graduate Student Committee continues its webinar series through 2020!