PopAging DataViz—UK
Visualising Population Data in

A THREE-DAY WORKSHOP AT THE UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  August 19th—21st, 2025
  Around 9 AM – 4:30 PM
  Riverside Pavilion and Terrace   (St Hilda’s College)


Instructor:
  Sakeef M. Karim
  skarim@amherst.edu

About the Workshop

PopAgingDataViz—UK 1 is a three-day workshop on visualising population data within —a powerful, open-source programming language for statistical computing and visualisation. Throughout the workshop, the ggplot2 library will serve as our workhorse and lodestar. Over the course of three days, workshop participants will be exposed to many of the principles undergirding the grammar of graphics framework for visualising data in systematic fashion (see Wilkinson 2005)—a grammar that serves as the lifeblood of ggplot2 and its many extensions.

Then, the course will slowly build in complexity. Concretely, participants will be exposed to modules on:

  • Constructing population pyramids and other plots that are germane to population research (e.g., Lexis diagrams).

  • Visualising geographic data to highlight the spatial foundations of social, political and demographic phenomena.

  • Using interactivity and animations to bring data visualisations to life.

  • Visualising statistical quantities of substantive interest (e.g., average marginal effects, counterfactual contrasts, adjusted predictions at representative values) to extract meaning from model results.

The workshop will draw on a wide range of packages and a series of hands-on exercises designed to concretise high-level concepts and principles related to data visualisation. All workshop materials are available—and will be maintained—on this course website and companion repository.

The Challenge

Contra previous iterations of PopAgingDataViz, our short course will not culminate with a friendly “Shark Tank” competition. Instead, participants will be asked to (i) work in pairs; and (ii) produce simple—but elegant—visualisations in with data that we provide. For more information, please click   The Challenge tab.

Sponsors

This short course is being co-hosted by the Consortium on Analytics for Data-Driven Decision-Making (CAnD3) and their partners at the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science at the University of Oxford.

CAnD3 is hosted at McGill University and supported in part by funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC).

Inspirations

Cédric Scherer’s (2022) course on Graphic Design with ggplot2, Andrew Heiss’ (2024) course on Data Visualization with R, and the third edition of ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis (Wickham, Navarro, and Pedersen 2023) all serve as inspirations for this three-day workshop.

Preliminaries

So, what do you need to do before the workshop begins in earnest? Please carefully review the document embedded below for a comprehensive answer.

Launch Full Page

References

Heiss, Andrew. 2024. “Data Visualization with R.” https://datavizf24.classes.andrewheiss.com/.
Scherer, Cédric. 2022. “Graphic Design with ggplot2.” https://rstudio-conf-2022.github.io/ggplot2-graphic-design/.
Wickham, Hadley, Danielle Navarro, and Thomas Lin Pedersen. 2023. “ggplot2: Elegant Graphics for Data Analysis.” https://ggplot2-book.org/.
Wilkinson, Leland. 2005. The Grammar of Graphics. Springer-Verlag. https://doi.org/10.1007/0-387-28695-0.

Footnotes

  1. Or PopAging DataViz—UK in non-stylized form.↩︎