bensoltoff
commented
7 years ago - Really creative use of animation. Also getting it to work in conjunction with Shiny - impressive!
- I like the color usage to indicate continent, though one problem is that many of the bubbles overlap. Could you implement some transparency or something similar to allow the hidden bubbles to shine through?
- This is a type of visualization that is probably much smoother and cleaner in D3. Right now the
ggplotly()object is rerendered every time the year changes. A bit of a hack to get it working in R, but I could see how D3 transitions would be quite useful for this graphic.
Reflection: This assignment is challenging, but interesting! I imitated the life expectancy - GDP bubble chart made by Gapminder to visualize the data. But to "replicate" an existing graph is not as easy as I thought, it propelled me to look at functions and arguments that I have not used before. Also, the combination of Shiny and flexdashboard is a little bit tricky. I spent quite long time fixing the layout problem, and finally found it was just because of a line break missing. Another difficulty I encountered is that after several rounds of optimization, the animation still runs so slow. I was wondering if there is any ways to improve the code efficiency.