Interactive presentations with deck.js

3 comments
Data analysis is often an iterative and interactive process. However, when I present about this subject, I feel often limited by the presentation software I use. It doesn't matter if I use LaTeX/PDF, PowerPoint or Keynote. In all cases it is either very difficult or impossible to include interactive charts, such as Flash or SVG charts. As a result I have to switch between various applications during the talk. This can be fun, but quite often it is not.

The other day I came across a presentation by Christopher Gandrud. Christopher had used deck.js, a JavaScript library for building HTML presentations by Caleb Troughton.

This looked like an interesting approach to me and fortunately the learning curve was not too steep, although I am by no means an html or JavaScript expert. So I created my first deck.js presentation based on the content of previous googleVis presentations. For the first time I can embed videos, Flash and SVG charts without using lots of different apps. I am actually quite pleased by the result, see here: Getting started with googleVis


Now imagine a presentation hosted on a server with R installed! You could combine your slides with R using one of the following packages R.rsp, brew, Rook, etc and run live demos, without opening a console.

3 comments :

Unknown said...

The presentation looks great! And thanks for putting together googleVis, it's really useful for teaching.

LuisManrique said...

It is really interesting, thank you very much!

Roberto Moscetti said...

Hi all,
another way to use googleVis chart into a presentation concerne the possibility of combine the solution described at the section 2.4 of vignettes (http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/googleVis/vignettes/googleVis.pdf) with LiveWeb (a helpfull Powerpoint plugin to insert web pages into slides).

Liveweb works well.

Further possibility is the use of a visual basic script, but at the moment I do not have try that way.

Thanks to Markus for googleVis package, great work!

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