Learn Illustrator, Tableau, visual design and more

The NCSU Libraries is pleased to announce our initial slate of visualization workshops for the spring 2018 semester. All workshops are interactive and are open to NC State students, faculty and staff. We are excited to offer some new workshops this semester led by postdoctoral scholars and graduate students through our Peer Scholars Program. With the workshops below, and our other visualization resources, we can help you become a data visualization expert.

All workshops take place in the ITTC Lab 2 in D. H. Hill Jr., unless otherwise noted. Visit the links below to register. If you have any questions about these workshops, each workshop page contains contact information.

The Libraries will be offering more visualization workshops throughout the semester, so please visit https://www.lib.ncsu.edu/workshops/visualization for updates.

Basics of Adobe Illustrator for Research Graphics
Wednesday, Jan. 17, 1-3 p.m. (Hunt Library, Creativity Studio)
In this workshop you will learn how to use basic tools available in Adobe Illustrator to prepare / import / modify graphs for research publications, create model cartoon figures, mechanism of reactions and more. This will be a great introduction to basic Illustrator tools that will help you prepare figures for grant proposals, research presentations, and publications. Adobe Illustrator will allow you to enhance and customize your graphics, setting you apart from the crowd and giving your work a more polished professional look.

Visualize Your Data with Tableau
Thursday, Jan. 18, 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Friday, March 2, 10:00-11:30 a.m.
This workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to creating interactive visualizations with Tableau Public, a free tool for creating visualizations and dashboards. Participants will create charts, graphs and dashboards from provided datasets. No prior experience is required.

Tableau II
Tuesday, Jan. 30, 10:00-11:30 a.m.
Monday, March 5, 10:00-11:30 a.m.
This intermediate level workshop is the second workshop in our Tableau series. In this workshop we will cover how to use calculated fields, filtering and story points in analyzing and presenting your data.

A LaTeX Primer
Wednesday, Jan. 31, 2-4 p.m.
LaTeX is a powerful typesetting program for creating all kinds of documents. Its “what you see is not what you get”' structure makes it very different from programs like Word. This code-based approach means users can quickly create standard documents from templates or have access to complete customization and scripting for more advanced projects. Simply put, LaTeX is a tool that enables the creation of beautiful documents; from manuscripts to dissertations, resumes to research posters. This workshop requires no prior knowledge of LaTeX nor any programming experience. We'll walk through getting started using Overleaf, a browser-based LaTeX tool. We’ll cover how to create documents such as reports and letters with features like equations, figures, and tables. The workshop will also include discussion on how to use and hack advanced templates (e.g., the NCSU thesis template or the IEEE journal standard), as well as tips for successful collaborative editing using Overleaf.

Elements of Visualization Design
Wednesday, Feb. 14, 1:30-2:30 p.m.
Tuesday, March 13, 1-2 p.m.
In this workshop, we will focus on designing attractive data visualizations for effective communication. Participants will learn design tools, such as Tableau, and get hands-on practice in creating a visualization that incorporates design elements based on accepted best practices grounded in current visualization research.

R for Absolute Beginners
Wednesday, Jan. 24, 1-2 p.m.
R is a language and computing environment for statistical analysis and graphics that is free and open-source. R can be used for multiple purposes, including statistics, data cleaning, visualization and creating data-driven web applications. R is very useful for producing publication-quality graphs from data. This workshop is an introduction to R for absolute beginners who have little or no prior experience with coding. No experience with coding is expected. If you have a solid coding background, this workshop may be too introductory for you.

Data Visualization with R
Wednesday, Feb. 7, 1-2 p.m.
This workshop will provide an introductory overview and hands-on practice with making data visualizations with R, a statistical computing language. Topics covered will include an overview of visualization packages, including ggplot2, ggvis, plotly, leaflet, and others, and considerations for creating publication-quality graphics using R. The hands-on activity will consist of creating a few visualizations using R in the RStudio development environment.

R for Document Creation
Wednesday, March 7, 1-2 p.m.
You may know that R is a statistical computing and graphics software, but do you know how to turn R scripts into PDFs, slideshows, HTML, scholarly articles, interactive dashboards, and books? This workshop will introduce and provide hands-on experience with R Markdown, a text formatting tool for publishing code (written in R, Python, and other languages) into documents of multiple formats. R Markdown allows researchers to publish their code along with their research enabling reproducibility.