mages' blog

Talking data: Building interactive relationships with data and colleagues

Last week I had the honour to give the opening keynote talk at the Talking Data South West
conference, organised by the Exeter Initiative for Statistics and its Applications. The event was chaired by Steve Brooks and brought together over 100 people to discuss all aspects of data: from collection and analysis through to visualisation and communication.

Building interactive relationships with data and colleagues

The programme was very good with a variety of talks such as How data collection from smart phones can improve agronomic decision making in potato crops by Robert Allen or Spatial data and analysis in the improvement of aquatic ecosystem health and drinking water quality by Nick Palling. I also liked Richard Everson's presentation on Visualising and understanding multi-criterion league tables, which showed new ideas to create rankings.

However, my highlight was Alan Smith's talk on Information for the Masses: Using Visualisation to Engage the Public. Alan heads up the Data Visualisation Unit at the Office for National Statistics and they created some fantastic online visualisation tools. He presented some interactive examples of the Census 2011 data set. Alan mentioned the hilarious story of a young lady, who had moved from Leeds to Elmbridge and used the Census data to find out why her new home was so dull compared to her old.

Screen shot of the 2011 Census comparator

The screen shot shows the age distribution of Leeds (left) and Elmbridge (right). Focus on the 20-24 year old age group and you'll get the joke.

googleVis 0.4.3 released with improved Geocharts

The Google Charts Tools provide two kinds of heat map charts for geographical data, the Flash based Geomap and the HTML5/SVG based Geochart.

I prefer the Geochart as it doesn't require Flash, but so far there have been two shortcomings with it: I couldn't add additional tooltip information and the default Mercator projection shows Greenland the size of Africa. Both of those issues seemed to have been resolved by Google. Although the features aren't officially documented and released yet, Mitchell Foley from the Google Chart Tools team presented the new developments at the Google I/O 2013 conference in May already.



With version 0.4.3 of googleVis, and thanks to John Muschelli, gvisGeoChart gained a new argument hovervar allowing users to add further information to the tooltip. Additionally, following the examples in Mitchell's presentation I can change the projection as well. The official release from Google shouldn't be too far away.

So, here are again the heat maps of countries' credit ratings from three American and one Chinese rating agency, sourced from Wikipedia. However, this time I use gvisGeoChart, setting the projection to Kavrayskiy VII and the tooltip to the actual rating letter(s), see the R code below.

R package development

Building R packages is not particular hard, but it can be a bit of a daunting endeavour at the beginning, particularly if you are more of a statistician than a computer scientist or programmer.

Some concepts may appear foreign or like red tape, yet many of them evolved over time for a reason. They help to stay organise, collaborate more effectively with others and write better code.

So, here are my slides of the R package development workshop at Lancaster University.

R package development

For a detailed and authoritative reference on R package development see the Writing R Extensions manual on CRAN.

Interactive slides with googleVis on shiny

Following on from last week's post, here are my slides on using googleVis on shiny from the Advanced R workshop at Lancaster University, 21 May 2013.

googleVis on shiny

Again, I wrote my slides in RMarkdown and I used slidify to create the HTML5 presentation. Unfortunately you may have to reload the slides that use googleVis on shiny as the JavaScript code in the background is potentially not ideal. Any pointers, which could help to improve the performance will be much appreciated.

Many of the examples in my slides are taken from my post First steps of using googleVis on shiny, however the presentation also demonstrates that it is possible to inject JavaScript code into a googleVis chart to trigger a shiny event, see also the example below.