Hack Session for NYTimes Dialect Map Visualization, Sponsored by OReilly Strata

Many thanks go to AlleyNYC for space sponsorship! The event food is sponsored by O'Reilly Strata!

Special thanks go to Vivian Zhang for giving such a great workshop!

NYC Data Science Academy is offering six relative courses:

RSVP Data Science with R, Beginner Level

RSVP Data Science with R, Intermediate Level

RSVP Introduction to Data Science by R, 2 Full Days

RSVP RStudio’s Master R Developer Workshop 2 Days

RSVP 20 Most Popular R Packages Series – Knitr – Dynamic Reporting

RSVP 20 Most Popular R Packages Series – Shiny – Web Applications

Slides:

Meetup Announcement:

Speaker:

Vivian Zhang is Co-Founder & CTO of Supstat Inc, a Statistical Consulting firm of top Data Scientists, Vivian is a data scientist who has been devoted to the analytics industry and the development and use of data technologies for several years. You can follow her on Twitter at @vivian_zhang @SupStat @nycdatasci  or #nycdatasci

Outline:

Previously, Josh Katz, Graphics Editor at The New York Times, talked on June 10 to discuss one of his projects, the "Dialect Map".  He discussed how spatial statistics, data visualization and information design all came together. (See blog post and video)

The Dialect Map project was the Times’ most popular content of the entire year of 2013. From the survey results, Josh created a series of maps depicting regional dialect variation in the US, which set off a sensation on the Internet and in popular media. From this, he developed the New York Times’ dialect quiz, turning what began as an exercise in spatial statistics and data visualization into some of the most-viewed content in NYT history.

In his talk, Josh delved into the background and development of the dialect maps and quiz–the story in general, as well as the math behind them. He talked about how data visualization and statistics could be used to illustrate the hidden contours of our world, extricating narrative from numbers and turning data into stories.

In this hack session, Vivian told you all you should know about choropleth map in R to make Dialect map. She started from the data scraping step to build the database of the survey, then she marched to the shiny development including functions for map plotting. Finally she established a fully developed shiny application demonstrating the dialect map project.

Preparation:

If you want to follow along, download these packages in R:(just run these codes):

install.packages(c("maps", "mapproj", "mapdata",  "ggplot2"))

and check the dataset out.

Other Useful Info Link:

Data used in this workshop: https://slides.nycdatascience.com/supstat_dialectmap/survey.result.rda

Example data: https://slides.nycdatascience.com/supstat_dialectmap/example_Data.RData

Previous shiny session (with slides, videos and sample application): https://nycdatascience.com/meetup/building-interactive-web-app-with-shiny/

Code to deploy your shiny app to shinyapps.io: https://slides.nycdatascience.com/supstat_dialectmap/shiny_deploy.R

if (!require("devtools"))
 install.packages("devtools")
devtools::install_github("rstudio/shinyapps")
library(shinyapps)
setAccountInfo(name='supstat', token='xxx', secret='xxxx')
deployApp()
#configureApp("dialect_map_shiny_project", size="xlarge")

Shiny application project folder (three files: "ui.r", "server.R", "survev.result.rda"): https://slides.nycdatascience.com/supstat_dialectmap/dialect_map_shiny_project.zip

Steps:
set dialect_map_shiny_project as your working folder
open shiny_deploy.r
grab your token from www.shinyapps.io and add to shiny_deploy.r, run it.