mages' blog

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.

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.

Last week I was invited to give an introduction to googleVis at Lancaster University. This time I decided to use the R package slidify for my talk. Slidify, like knitr, is built on Markdown and makes it very easy to create beautiful HTML5 presentations.

Introduction to googleVis

Separating content from layout is always a good idea. Markup languages such as TeX/LaTeX or HTML are built on this principle. Ramnath Vaidyanathan has done a fantastic job with slidify, as it is very straightforward to create presentations with R. There are a couple of advantages compared to traditional presentation software packages:

• RMarkdown helps me to focus on the content
• Integration of R code is build in
• HTML5 allows me to embed interactive content, such as
  
  • Videos
  • googleVis and other interactive charts
  • shiny apps (more on this next week)

In the past I have used knitr in combination with pandoc to generate a slidy presentation. However, with slidfiy I can do all this in R directly. And better, Ramnath provides me with a choice of different layout frameworks and syntax highlighting options. Finally to top it all, publishing the slides on Github was only one more R statement: publish('mages', 'Introduction_to_googleVis').

I will give a half-day tutorial on googleVis with Diego de Castillo at useR2013! in Albacete on 9 July 2013. I hope to see some of you there.