01.05.2017 Views

348957348957

You also want an ePaper? Increase the reach of your titles

YUMPU automatically turns print PDFs into web optimized ePapers that Google loves.

een possible to use R to produce web-based interactive data visualizations.<br />

Things changed dramatically with the advent of rCharts<br />

(http://ramnathv.github.io/rCharts). The rCharts open-source package for R takes your<br />

data and parameters as input and then quickly converts them to a JavaScript code block output.<br />

Code block outputs from rCharts can use one of many popular JavaScript data visualization<br />

libraries, including NVD3, Highcharts, Rickshaw, xCharts, Polychart, and Morris. To see some<br />

examples of data visualizations created by using rCharts, check out the data visualizations located<br />

on its GitHub page.<br />

Mapping with rMaps<br />

rMaps (http://rmaps.github.io) is the brother of rCharts. Both of these open-source R<br />

packages were crafted by Ramnath Vaidyanathan. Using rMaps, you can create animated or<br />

interactive choropleths, heat maps, or even maps that contain annotated location droplets (such as<br />

those found in the JavaScript mapping libraries Leaflet, CrossLet, and Data Maps).<br />

rMaps allows you to create a spatial data visualization containing interactive sliders that users can<br />

move to select the data range they want to see.<br />

If you’re an R user and you’re accustomed to using the simple R Markdown syntax to<br />

create web pages, you’ll be happy to know that you can easily embed both rCharts and rMaps<br />

in R Markdown.<br />

If you prefer Python to R, Python users aren’t being left out on this trend of creating<br />

interactive web-based visualizations within one platform. Python users can use server-side<br />

web app tools such as Flask — a less–user-friendly but more powerful tool than Shiny —<br />

and the Bokeh and Mpld3 modules to create client-side JavaScript versions of Python<br />

visualizations. The Plotly tool has a Python application programming interface (API) — as<br />

well as ones for R, MATLAB, and Julia — that you can use to create web-based interactive<br />

visualizations directly from your Python IDE or command line. (Check out Flask at<br />

http://flask.pocoo.org, Bokeh at http://bokeh.pydata.org, Mpld3 at<br />

http://mpld3.github.io, and Plotly at https://plot.ly.)<br />

Examining Scraping, Collecting, and Handling<br />

Tools<br />

Whether you need data to support a business analysis or an upcoming journalism piece, webscraping<br />

can help you track down interesting and unique data sources. In web-scraping, you set up<br />

automated programs and then let them scour the web for the data you need. I mention the general

Hooray! Your file is uploaded and ready to be published.

Saved successfully!

Ooh no, something went wrong!