Shiny - Interactive visualizations in R

Karel KroezeKarel Kroeze
June 3, 2022, 13:00 - 17:00

A picture says more than a thousand words. But can you have a conversation with a picture? With R and Shiny, you can!

BDSi is organizing a workshop on creating interactive visualizations with R and Shiny. In one afternoon, we’ll quickly introduce the basic concepts, and build an interactive visualization together. You can bring your own data, or work on an example provided by BDSi. At the end of the day, you will be able to create and share interactive visualizations to communicate your research, or help explain complex topics to your students.

Shiny is an R package that enables R to interact with websites, allowing for interactive websites that can update when new data is available, the user interacts with the website, and much more. A large gallery of applications built on R is available on https://shiny.rstudio.com/gallery/. BDSi has also created a number of apps - ranging from small interactive examples for education (e.g., the Normal Distribution app developed for an online book on linear methods for Social Sciences students, or the BMS visualization library helping choose between different visualization options for different types of data), research (e.g., PACBOARD, a dashboard for the exploration of meta-models of probabilistic analysis in healthcare economics).

Interactive visualizations are a great way to let your audience - whether they be students, academics, or the general public - explore and understand complex topics, datasets and analyses. Best of all, creating simple interactive visualizations is easy, and there are reliable and free options available to host the visualizations you’ve created.

In this workshop, you will develop an interactive version of an existing visualization, analysis, or dataset (we encourage you to bring your own, but we will also have examples available), and publish it online. At the end of the day, you will be able to develop simple applications and share them with your audience.

Date: June 3rd, 13:00 - 17:00
Location: TBA, on campus
Prerequisites: basic familiarity with R and ggplot2 (or whichever plotting library you prefer)

Register now!

For questions about this workshop, please contact bdsi@utwente.nl.