Level: Intermediate (I)
 

This tutor lead, virtual course will introduce how to create interactive dashboards and web applications using R and Shiny. The first day will focus on the core components of a Shiny app; inputs, outputs and reactive expressions. It will also cover how to design responsive webs applications that seamlessly work on mobile devices. By the end of the day you'll be able to design and deploy a Shiny app from your local machine to shinyapps.io.

The second day of the course will cover the following advanced topics:

• Embedding interactive charts/maps/network diagrams using the following htmlwidget libraries; leafley, highcharter and visNetwork.

• Allow users to upload data files into a Shiny app

• Allow users to download files/images from a Shiny app

• Selectively show/hide content with shinyjs

• Advice and guidance on structuring large/complex Shiny apps

All the required software will be provided to the participants online.
 

Learning Outcomes

• Confidently design user interfaces in Shiny with appropriately selected controls/inputs

• Understand reactivity to effectively update outputs based on specific inputs

• Design responsive Shiny apps that work on both desktop and mobile devices

• Confidently embed htmlwidgets into Shiny apps and extract user interactions (click/touch)

• Effectively structure large/complex Shiny apps
                               

Topics Covered

R, Data Visualisation, Shiny, Data Presentation and Exploratory Data Analysis
 

Target Audience

Those who want to create interactive applications for users to explore datasets. Also, those who want to create applications where users can upload their own datasets for analysis and download results/charts. All of the course examples will be Shiny apps that use/expect real-world datasets. Participants will be using a wide range of datasets, from numerical observations, geolocations, collaboration network data and text corpuses. Therefore the course should be of interest to those in the social, physical or medical sciences, economics or computer science fields.
 

Knowledge Assumed

Familiarity with the R language is required as a number of fairly complicated concepts will be introduced in this course:

• Reactive expressions

• Controlling how data moves between the client and server

• Deploying Shiny apps to the web

Charlie Hadley

Charlie Hadley is currently a Research Technology Specialist at Oxford University specialising in data visualisation, as well as being a content creator for Lynda.com. Her background is in biophysics and statistical computing, completing her MPhys at University of Leeds and a short research post at University of Birmingham on biomineralisation. 

Charlie was a senior technology consultant at Wolfram Research for 3 years working primarily on finance and HR projects, in addition to consulting for the Estonian ComputerBasedMath.org project.

 At Oxford University, Charlie is helping to launch a data visualisation service for researchers. Initially this service exclusively provides Shiny consultative support, but further technologies will be added in the future as the team grows.