Motion Chart

googleVis 0.5.6 released on CRAN

Version 0.5.6 of googleVis was released on CRAN over the weekend. This version fixes a bug in gvisMotionChart. Its arguments xvar, yvar, sizevar and colorvar were not always picked up correctly. Thanks to Juuso Parkkinen for reporting this issue. Example: Love, or to love A few years ago Martin Hilpert posted an interesting case study for motion charts. Martin is a linguist and he researched how the usage of words in American English changed over time, e.

UK house prices visualised with googleVis-0.2.16

A new version of googleVis has been released on CRAN and the project site. Version 0.2.16 adds the functionality to plot quarterly and monthly data as a motion chart. To illustrate the new feature I looked for a quarterly data set and stumbled across the quarterly UK house price data published by Nationwide, a building society. The data is available in a spread sheet format and presents the average house prices and indexed to 100 in Q1 1993 by region in the UK from Q4 1973 to Q1 2012.

Setting the initial view of a motion chart in R

Following on from my article about accessing and plotting World Bank data with R I want to talk about how to change the initial view of a motion chart. Over the last couple of weeks I have been asked a view times how to do this. For instance Stephen O’Grady wanted to create a motion chart, which shows initially a line chart, rather than a bubble chart. Changing the initial settings of a motion chart is actually quite easy, if you know how to.

Accessing and plotting World Bank data with R

Over the past couple of days I played around with the data sets of the World Bank, and I have to admit that I am blown away by it. It is amazing, to see what is available on their web site and it is worth visiting their Data Visualisation Tools page. It is fantastic that they provide an API to their data. They have used it to build an iPhone App which is pretty cool.