ETC5523: Communicating with Data

Tutorial 1

🎯 Objectives

• understand what elements make certain questions harder or easier to answer
• classify types of communication
• modify communication to be more effective

Preparation

• Install the R-packages below:

install.packages(c("rmarkdown", "tidyverse", "reprex"))

• Download the daily maximum temperature from the Australian Government, Bureau of Meteorology, at the Melbourne Airport weather station here. You can find the note about this data here

• You can similarly download the daily minimum temperature at the Melbourne Airport weather station from here and the note about this data here

👥 Exercise 1A

Asking questions

Study each of the examples from Stack Overflow and write the good points of their communication and where applicable, how you would improve communicating the author’s problem.

1. Problem rendering a list of multiple object types in Rmarkdown
2. How to paste variable to all values in column
3. Convert only certain rows from long to wide in R
4. How to transform 3 seperate numeric variables into 3 levels of one variable?
5. Looping variables in the parameters of the YAML header of an R Markdown file and automatically outputting a PDF for each variable

💻 Exercise 1B

Reproducible example

Generate a reproducible example to answer the questions 2 from 1A using the reprex R-package.

👥️ Exercise 1C

Classify the types of communication

For the following scenarios, classify the type of communication.

1. In the news: “Coldest morning in four years. This comes as several more Melbourne suburbs recorded their coldest morning since 2018. Coldstream – a township in the Greater Melbourne area won the unenviable title recording the coldest morning, with residents waking up to -3.7C temperatures.”
2. In someone’s code: “# FIXME: use sum instead of +”
3. In a conversation between person A and person B:
   A: Based on the sales of the last round, we have to change the promotion of the products.
   B: How do we need to change it?
   A: Well the new brand of the skin care range didn’t do well.
   B: I thought market research suggested that was what the consumers wanted?
   A: Yes, I think we didn’t promote it enough.

Reflect on your own communication style for intrapersonal, interpersonal, small group, public and mass communications. How does it differ?

👥️ Exercise 1D

Effective communciation

This year’s winter in Melbourne is particularly cold. Using the daily maximum and/or minimum temperature data from the Bureau of Meteorology at the Melbourne Airport, construct a narrative to demonstrate this for 3 possible audiences below:

1. Small group
2. Public
3. Mass

What elements of your communciation differ for the three different scenarios above?