Working With R and Visual Analytics

This we create a simple line chart using R-lang and R Studio. To carry on the theme of using data from my Zed.run data, I pulled the last 20 races for one of my horses all at the 1600m distance. I got the finish results and put them into a vector or list in R.

Here I show my code with comments.

My line chart includes the 20 finish times as well as a set of dotted red lines to show you the one full standard deviation over or under the average finish time. The green dotted line in the center is the average finish time for this horse.

I feel that this visualisation fit into Few and Yau's discussion on conducting basic visualization based on descriptive analysis because the finish times are plotted to allowing the viewer to observe the trends and patterns in the data. The chart also includes a horizontal line that represents the average of the times provided in the data set. This provides a central reference point for undersstanding times that are above or below the averages. I also include the standard deviation as a dotted line again allowing observers to visually see the instances where the finish times are below or above one standard deviation from the mean. With the legend attached explaining the dotted lines, viewers are able to interpret the information with very little explanation.