Workshop Shiny for education and valorization

Karel KroezeKarel Kroeze
October 3, 2024, 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!

Overview

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. We’ll specifically focus on two example use-cases: an app letting students explore statistical concepts, and one making a predictive model available to users. 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 yourself.

What is Shiny?

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., Figure 1, a Normal Distribution app developed for a linear methods textbook for Social Sciences students, or the BMS visualization library helping choose between different visualization options for different types of data), research (e.g., Figure 2, PACBOARD, a dashboard for the exploration of meta-models of probabilistic analysis in healthcare economics).

A simple normal distribution for students to interact with

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.

PACBOARD: A dashboard for the systematic exploration and validation of the inputs and outputs of a probabylistic analysis obtained from a health economic model

Workshop Details

Contents

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.

Requirements

Basic familiarity with R and ggplot2 (or whichever plotting library you prefer). If you already have an analysis, model, dataset, etc. that you want to build a Shiny application around that’s great, but you can also participate with one of the examples we provide.

Don’t forget to bring your laptop, and make sure you have a working and up-to-date R/RStudio installation before we start!

Schedule

The (target) schedule alternates short lectures with hands-on sessions, immediately applying what we cover in the lectures. Breaks are planned, but exact times may change based on how the day progresses. If you have limited time, feel free to join us when you can - but please let us know in advance if you’re planning to join later or leave early so that we can plan accordingly.

Date & Location

Date: October 3rd, 13:00 - 17:00
Location: TBA, on campus

Registration

Register now!

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