Interactivity

Content for Monday, November 4, 2024–Friday, November 8, 2024

Readings

Important updates!

Since recording these materials, there have been a few big changes in the world of R-related interactivity:

1. Quarto now exists as a better, more fully featured version of R Markdown
2. Quarto Pub now exists for hosting published documents and websites for free
3. As of the end of 2023, Quarto supports dashboards so there’s no need for {flexdashboard}

As a result, there are two important things to note while you watch the lectures:

1. The “Making interactive graphs” section of the slides and videos refers to the {flexdashboard} package. Disregard that and mentally replace mentions of {flexdashboard} with “Quarto Dashboards”.
2. The “Sharing content” section of the slides and videos refers to an online service called RPubs. Disregard all of that. I’ve omitted that video here.

Explorable explanations

• Marcel Salathé and Nicky Case, “What Happens Next: COVID-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Situations”
• Brett Victor, “Explorable Explanations”
• Look at some of the explorable explorations here
• Dragicevic, Jansen, Sarma, Kay, and Chevalier, “Explorable Multiverse Analyses”. Use Chrome, open Example 1, scroll to page 2, and click on some of the blue text to change the results of the paper within the paper itself. This is magical. Quarto can’t quite get this interactive in real-time, but you can knit different versions of a document with slightly different parameters and options.

Dashboards

• Look at some of these examples of Quarto dashboards and Shiny apps
• Stephanie Evergreen, “How a Dashboard Changes the Conversation”
• Stephanie Evergreen, “The Problem with Dashboards (and a Solution)”
• Stephen Few, “2012 Perceptual Edge Dashboard Design Competition: A Solution of My Own”
• Skim through Stephen Few’s presentation on Information Dashboard Design
• Google “dashboard design” and skim through some of the thousands of articles about what makes a good (and bad) dashboard

Possible questions to reflect on

This is not a required list!

Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. All that matters is that you show good engagement with the readings.

• How helpful (or unhelpful) are explorable explanations?
• Have you seen examples of good dashboards before this class? Bad dashboards? What makes them good or bad?

Slides

The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Making interactive graphs

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: