STA 9750 Week 8 Pre Assignment: More Plots

Due Date: 2025-03-26 (Wednesday) at 11:45pm

Submission: CUNY Brightspace

This week, we will dive deeper into the world of data visualization, with a focus on tools for interactive (and animated) data visualization. Before doing so, let’s pause and consolidate everything we’ve done to date:

1. If you did not finish last week’s in-class lab, do so now.

2. Explore the R Graphics Gallery “Best Charts” collection. Pick one chart from this collection and evaluate it with a critical eye:

   1. Is it well styled?
   2. What story is it trying to tell?
   3. Does it tell that story effectively?
   4. Do you believe that story?
   5. How could it tell the story more effectively?

Optional Enrichment: Myth Busting and Apophenia in Data Visualization

Watch Prof. Di Cook’s lecture “Myth busting and apophenia in data visualisation: is what you see really there?”. As we discussed in class, plots are an excellent way to explore data, but we always want to be careful that what we think find truly exists. Prof. Cook discusses relationships between effective statistical visualization and effective statistical practice.

Ok - we’re now ready to move forward. This week, we will explore various technologies for interactive data visualization. These can be divided into two broad categories:

• Server Based: When the user makes a change to a plot, it is sent to a server where the new plot is rendered and returned to the user.
• Browser Based: When the user makes a change to a plot, the new plot is created in the browser and re-rendered ‘on site’.

Generally, server-based approaches are more flexible (and a bit easier to implement) while browser-based approaches are more responsive and scalable. Since the browser work is done locally on the user’s computer (or phone or tablet), they are also cheaper and safer to run as there’s no need to have a server constantly responding to user input.

This week, we will explore a bit of each modality, though entire courses (and indeed entire careers) have been spent on both.

In the R ecosystem, the tool of choice for building server-based¹ web applications is shiny.² For this pre-assignment, you will work through Lessons 1 and 2 of the “Shiny Basics” web tutorial. (You do not need to do the “Next Steps” in Lesson 3, but you are of course welcome to.)

After finishing these activities, complete the Weekly Pre-Assignment Quiz on Brightspace.

Footnotes

1. There is an effort to run shiny fully in browser (avoiding the need for a web server). It is still a work-in-progress, but you can try it out on the r-shinylive website, with a full gallery of examples here.

2. If you are more of a Python person, you can also check out the Python versions of shiny and shinylive.