Telling stories with interactive graphics

This week is a bit of a departure from some of the ‘strictly GIS’ components of the course to explore some more creative approaches to data (spatial or otherwise) visualization. Using the idea of the storymap as motivation, we’ll take a look at some of the growing list of tools that R provides to integrate high-powered data analysis with interactive web applications into an intuitive, visually appealing webpage. As publicly funded scientists are increasingly called upon to make their research available to the public, these tools provide a valuable framework for moving your research beyond the university walls or outside of paywalled journals.

Resources

• The Arranging Views chapter in (Sievert 2020) introduces flexdashboards and describes how plotly and other htmlwidgets can be integrated for a complete data-plot-story pipeline.

• This blogpost by Zev Ross provides a very thorough introduction to shiny, it’s syntax, and the ideas of reactivity in interactive applications.

• The shiny and flexdashboard pages at RStudio have lots of examples of cool applications of both products, tutorials, and cheatsheets. There is a lot more to them than we’ll be able to cover in this class, but there’s plenty of additional material on both webpages.

Slides

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• Telling stories with interactive graphics
• Structuring stories
• Storyboards in R
• Introducing Shiny