Interactivity
Content for Monday, October 23, 2023–Friday, October 27, 2023
Readings
Explorable explanations
- Marcel Salathé and Nicky Case, “What Happens Next: COVID-19 Futures, Explained with Playable Situations”
- Brett Victor, “Explorable Explanations”
- Look at some of the explorable explorations here
- Dragicevic, Jansen, Sarma, Kay, and Chevalier, “Explorable Multiverse Analyses”. Use Chrome, open Example 1, scroll to page 2, and click on some of the blue text to change the results of the paper within the paper itself. This is magical. R Markdown can’t quite get this interactive in real-time, but you can knit different versions of a document with slightly different parameters and options.
Dashboards
- Look at some of these examples of Shiny apps
- Stephanie Evergreen, “How a Dashboard Changes the Conversation”
- Stephanie Evergreen, “The Problem with Dashboards (and a Solution)”
- Stephen Few, “2012 Perceptual Edge Dashboard Design Competition: A Solution of My Own”
- Skim through Stephen Few’s presentation on Information Dashboard Design
- Google “dashboard design” and skim through some of the thousands of articles about what makes a good (and bad) dashboard
Possible questions to reflect on
Remember, you don’t need to answer all of these—or even any of them! These are just here to help guide your thinking. Write about whatever you want.
- How helpful (or unhelpful) are explorable explanations?
- Have you seen examples of good dashboards before this class? Bad dashboards? What makes them good or bad?
Slides
The slides for this week’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.
Videos
Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.
You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here: