htmlwidgets for standalone interactive display of maps, scatterplots, time-series, graphs and more

[bbest]

Hi @jules32, @jafflerbach, @oharac, @Melsteroni, @stevejbrown,

I'd like to propose giving a demo to eco-data-science on the power of htmlwidgets.org for interactive display of maps, time series charts, network graphs and more. And this functionality gets rendered as a standalone HTML page from an Rmarkdown document; meaning you don't need a Shiny server or even R installed for someone else to see it, just a web browser either opening local file or on free web server (eg github.io). It also works in the RStudio console and can plug in with Shiny for user interactions and back-end functions. For greater depth, check out the blog buildingwidgets.com.

Would also be of interest to ucsb-data-science, NCEAS and SFG. Could use existing spatial tutorials and OHI as examples. Open to others.

What do you think?

---

PS For this more public ticket, here's the snippet of examples I previously shared in private at https://github.com/OHI-Science/issues/issues/515 ...

By the way, there are some pretty cool htmlwidgets that you can use with these pretty map and carpet plots to generate popup values on hover, which make them super useful for inspection. And this interactivity can be easily generated from Rmarkdown document into a portable standalone HTML, ie no Shiny server needed.

To share via URL (vs attachment which needs to get downloaded and opened in a browser separately), you could place the HTML files on a gh-pages branch of a repo or use htmlpreview or rawgit.

Here are the showcase examples with static image screenshot. Follow links to see interactive hover.

• leaflet

  library(leaflet)
  pal <- colorQuantile("YlOrRd", NULL, n = 8)
  leaflet(orstationc) %>% 
    addTiles() %>%
    addCircleMarkers(color = ~pal(tann))

  

  For applicability to OHI maps, see this Rmarkdown example of Creating a Leaflet choropleth map with a pop-up in R.

• d3heatmap

  library(d3heatmap)
  d3heatmap(mtcars, scale="column", colors="Blues")

  

[jules32]

Sounds awesome! Maybe we can schedule you in November?

[Melsteroni]

I am enthusiastic about learning more!

[jamiecmontgomery]

Hi @bbest

This looks great and I would absolutely love a tutorial on this!!

It might be better suited to do an RMarkdown session first though? To make
the utility of these tools more apparent and accessible for the larger
group - what do you think?

I've had some folks at NCEAS ask about an RMarkdown session so I'm thinking
of putting one together relatively soon. And then we could follow up with
this awesomeness so November would be a perfect time if you are able to do
it then.

[remi-daigle]

Please do this before I leave!!!

[bbest]

Here's the material:

http://ucsb-bren.github.io/env-info/wk06_widgets.html

I'd be happy to present this after April 4th.

[jamiecmontgomery]

Hi @bbest - would you be interested in teaching html widgets sometime in the near future?

[bbest]

Hey @jafflerbach,

Sorry about the monstrous lag (I was traveling previously). Yeah, I'd be happy to lead a session on htmlwidgets, which in my mind is something of a data science revolution in being able to port the powerful visualization web libraries to your data using simple R functions that work for both Rmarkdown to html pages or Shiny interactive app contexts.

We can talk more at this Thursday's gathering or schedule in advance.

Thanks, Ben