Abstract:
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Technical advances of web technologies have brought a rich collection of JavaScript libraries for data visualization and interactive exploration. However, the JavaScript language can be a barrier to data analysts and statisticians. By comparison, the R language, as the "lingua franca" of data analysis and statistical computing, is much more widely known and used. The R package htmlwidgets aims to seamlessly bridge R and JavaScript, and make it possible for R users to call JavaScript libraries without knowing any JavaScript. A JavaScript visualization can be created through pure R syntax just like normal R plotting commands. In this talk, we demonstrate some HTML widgets built on top of JavaScript libraries, such as DataTables (to display tabular data), leaflet (to create interactive maps), dygraphs (to visualize time series), and so on. All HTML widgets work in three scenarios that we will show in this presentation: in the R console (any R console, including RStudio), in R Markdown documents, and in Shiny applications. We will also briefly mention how widgets work under the hood so potential developers know how to write their own widget packages.
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