Syllabus

Lecturer

Dates

  • Oct 9, 2023 – Dec 18, 2023
  • Mondays
  • 10:00–12:00
  • TC.3.10

Highlights

  • max. 30 students
  • Learn about innovation
  • Improve your R coding skills
  • Visualize with exlusive data

Course design

The lecturer introduces into the principles of data visualization with applications in economic policy. As the graphic illustration of statistical data gains in importance in both the academic and the public discourse, students will learn best practices and gain insights into visualization techniques. A large part of each session is dedicated to the work with data, where the lecturer provides R-code to produce figures in class.

Students are expected to recreate three charts at home at the beginning of the semester and create a comprehensive data visualization with exclusive data from the Austrian Patent Office. Studens will present their chart in class and draft a report with a detailed description of the data, the code and the final visualization in RMarkdown. Moreover, the best charts are awarded by the Austrian Patent Office.

The sessions are designed to encourage students to actively participate in the debates, raise questions, and gain experience in visualizing data for academic publications or the general debate.

Learning outcomes

After completing this course, students will:

  • know key figures in various fields of economic policy and innovation economics
  • show improved programming skills in R and the ability to create a RMarkdown report
  • have basic knowledge of important principles of data visualization
  • be able to create charts to enrich their academic articles

Grading

  • Assignments: 30% (0-10 points for each visualization)
  • Chart presentation: 30% (0-20 points for the quality of the presentation, 0-10 for the preliminary chart)
  • Written report: 40% (0-40 points for the report and the final chart)

  100-90: Excellent     89-80: Good     79-65: Satisfactory     64-50: Sufficient

All single tasks have to be passed (50% threshold each).