dwillis / sportsdatabook

Turning my sports data analysis and visualization course materials into a book using R and Bookdown

Sports Data Analysis

This is an attempt to convert the course materials from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln's College of Journalism and Mass Communications course called SPMC 350 - Sports Data Analysis and Visualization. The entire course is in R and promotes replicable methods for data analysis to students who likely have done no programmatic data analysis and have zero experience working with code. The course philosophy, given those realities, is to have lots of small assignments that build on each other step by step. Those small assignments are of little value each, but add up to a substantial portion of the class grade. Students then have to complete two substantial projects throughout the term, combining an analysis notebook, charts, a blog post written for a general audience making a claim and backing it up with data and a verbal presentation in class.

The chapters attempt a sort of meta narrative where each chapter is a skill and each skill leads to the next skill. When the visual chapters start, each chapter represents a shape of the data and what it represents. The last chapters are about preparing charts to be publication ready from ggplot.

This book will evolve as my course does, adding things as I add them.

If you are an instructor, the last chapter is example assignments for each chapter. The basic philosophy there is to make students answer practical questions that a data analyst might be asked, be it at a news organization or within a sporting organization.