Past

• PhD in statistics from Iowa State University (December, 2016)
  • Dissertation: Interfacing R with web technologies for interactive statistical graphics (link)

Present

• Freelance software engineer, data scientist, and educator
  • Maintaining plotly (~ 2 years!)
    • Looking for "real-world applications".
  • Developing rerddap (interface to NOAA data).
  • Authoring O'Reilly Oriole (online tutorial mixing video, text, code).
    • Looking to run similar live workshops (experience at Iowa State, Monash, plotcon)

• Why interactive graphics for presentation?
  • Enhances knowledge transfer (see New York Times)
• Why interactive graphics for exploration?
  • Identify structure that otherwise goes missing (Tukey 1972)
  • Better understand/diagnose models (Wickham, Cook, & Hofmann 2015).
  • Generate insights faster (iteration time is crucial!)

• Portable (i.e., cross-platform)
• Simple to share (especially self-contained HTML)
• Encourages composability (i.e., reports, dashboards, etc)
• Enables integration of multiple systems (1 + 1 > 2)

• Great for conveying information (viz is known), but impractical for exploration (viz is unknown).

• The reality: analysts have to learn/juggle many technologies.
• My goal: An R interface that makes 80% of techniques seamless, quick, and easy (w/o knowledge of web technology).

     County |   State | TotalVotes| Clinton| Johnson| Stein| Trump| Population|    Area
    --------| --------| ----------|--------|--------|------|------|-----------|--------
1   autauga | alabama |      24661|   0.240|   0.022| 0.004| 0.734|      54571|  594.44
2   baldwin | alabama |      94090|   0.196|   0.026| 0.005| 0.774|     182265| 1589.78
3   barbour | alabama |      10390|   0.467|   0.009| 0.002| 0.523|      27457|  884.88
4      bibb | alabama |       8748|   0.214|   0.014| 0.002| 0.770|      22915|  622.58
5    blount | alabama |      25384|   0.085|   0.013| 0.004| 0.899|      57322|  644.78
6   bullock | alabama |       4701|   0.751|   0.005| 0.002| 0.242|      10914|  622.81
7    butler | alabama |       8685|   0.428|   0.007| 0.001| 0.563|      20947|  776.83
8   calhoun | alabama |      47376|   0.279|   0.024| 0.006| 0.692|     118572|  605.87
9  chambers | alabama |      13778|   0.418|   0.012| 0.003| 0.566|      34215|  596.53
10 cherokee | alabama |      10503|   0.145|   0.014| 0.002| 0.839|      25989|  553.70
# ... with 3,101 more rows

• Is there a relationship between population density and voting preference?

• All these examples:
  • Are self-contained HTML (easy to share/deploy/embed!)
  • 3 types of manipulation: focusing, arranging, and/or linking views.
• Cook, Buja, & Swayne 1996: {focusing, arranging, linking} => {find Gestalt, pose queries, make comparisons}
  • Linking has different interpretations (database query)
  • Focusing is deceivingly general.
  • Arrangement must (currently) be specified at runtime.

We can only go so far without shiny

* What if we want to display a statistical summary of a selecton?

d <- SharedData$new(mpg)
dots <- plot_ly(d, color = ~class, x = ~displ, y = ~cyl)
boxs <- plot_ly(d, color = ~class, x = ~class, y = ~cty) %>% add_boxplot()
bars <- plot_ly(d, x = ~class, color = ~class)

subplot(dots, boxs) %>%
  subplot(bars, nrows = 2) %>%
  layout(
    dragmode = "select",
    barmode = "overlay",
    showlegend = FALSE
  )

• plotly.js "natively" supports a few statistical graphics (e.g., bar charts, histograms, and boxplots)

• Dynamically updating other statistical graphics (e.g., densities, fitted lines, violins, etc) currently requires linking views with shiny

http://github.com/cpsievert/zikar

• Keep adding documentation and examples to plotly for R book
• Further advance plotly's support for linking views (without shiny).
  • plotly.js itself may gain some support…
• Support for more popular ggplot2 extension packages such as ggrepel and ggraph.
  • Integrating plotly's support for linking tree-structures with ggraph would be particularly interesting.