Write a blog post explaining what you found. It should answer:

  1. What is the question(s) you tried to answer? Why should someone care?
  2. What is the data/how did you get it?
  3. How did you answer the questions (e.g. what statistical techniques, etc)?
  4. What are your findings?

Points 1 and 4 are the most important for the blog post (your analysis document focuses on 2 and 3). This blog post should be aimed at a general audience who is not afraid of graphs/a little data (think 538). The vast majority of the technical details should be in the analysis document.

Requirements for the blog post

  • The post should be 1000-1500 words (unless you made a shiny app – see below).
    • Include a title, a link to the STOR 390 homepage and your names.
    • Don’t display R code unless it is used to convey a point.
  • There should be at least 2 visualizations.
    • Make sure to describe the figures somewhere in the text.
    • These plots should be communicatory plots, not exploratory plots.
  • The post should be submitted in html (probably written in R Markdown)
  • Write a one paragraph summary of the project to be included separately in a text file.

Submission

Include everything that went into creating this plot post in a folder called n_blog (where n = your group number). You can name the blog post whatever you want, just make sure it is a .html document. Please compress n_blog and email it to the instructor.

I plan on posting these blog posts and your analyses on the course webpage. If you do not want your name associated with the post (or if you don’t want even an anonymous version of the post displayed to the outside world) please email the instructor

Grading

  • Communication (80%)
    • Does your main point come through (e.g. see here)?
    • Is the document written well and clearly? Yes spelling and grammar matter.
    • Quality of the figures.
    • Does the document follow principles of effective communication? You might want to review the communication lecture.
  • Accuracy (10%)
    • Do you accurately convey a rigorous argument?
  • Ambition (10%)

Requirement flexibility

If you think the final deliverable for your project should be significantly better if is not constrained by the above please reach out to the instructor. For example,

  • Your project is aimed at a more particular audience (e.g. if you did some fancy machine learning). In this case we might weight your technical analysis more heavily and you can write your blog post for a technical audience.

  • If you wrote a shiny app:
    • The written component of the blog plots can be much shorter.
    • The graders will focus more on the app. Test it to make sure it works. The principles of effective communication apply to an app.

Bonus points

Your team will get up to 5 extra points on the final project grade if you do the following:

  • make a webpage using github pages (see here)
  • (if you made a shiny app) post your shiny app (see here)

Github pages are very easy to make. The webpage should showoff all aspects of your project including the blog post and technical analysis. The better this page is the more points you will get.