IX. Prague R Meetup

Another R user community meeting after a long covid break. This time with a foreign guest Colin Fay. Location to be determined depending on the number of participants:-)

Colin Fay (https://colinfay.me/): Keynote

Vít Gabrhel: Combining R {tidyverse, leaflet, DT, highcharter, flexdashboard, crosstalk} and Python {pandas, GeoPy} to create a lightweight psychotherapy dashboard.
Shiny is a neat tool for creating customized dashboard applications. However, developing and deploying (and scaling) it may feel overwhelming for first-timers, despite the wealth of existing resources on the matter. Fortunately, there is flexdashboard, a package enabling R users to utilize interactive elements of shiny on top of an R Markdown document. This talk presents an example of flexdashboard applying several packages with interactive features such as Leaflet or DataTables in the context of psychotherapy lookup.

Jirka Novák, David Morávek: Shiny app for creating life tables at the CZSO
The contribution introduces the shiny application, which was created in order to simplify the creation of life tables, visualization and their easier adaptation to the needs of users at the Czech Statistical Office. The application was developed within the International Data Science Accelerator program.

Michal Kunc and Alena Šindelářová (PAQ Research): Using WordR to create parametrized reports in MS Word
The talk shares our experience with using the WordR package as connective tissue between an SQL database of regional socio-economic and educational data and analytical reports for regional schooling administrators.

The WordR package creates parametrized reports with both the template and the output as .docx files. It combines plots, tables and inline code rendering using the officer, ggplot and flextable packages. This allows the report templates to be prepared by users with limited technical knowledge, while giving them access to the formatting possibilities of MS Word, and keeping the text contents of the report fully editable ex-post.

Jakub Novotný: Crosstalk - serverless interactive dashboards using R
Crosstalk is an R package that allows R users to create interactive dashboards from R that can be run in a browser without R. This makes deployment and sharing the dashboards with non-R users much easier. Under the hood, crosstalk is a JavaScript library that creates a shared dataset that can be used by other JavaScript backed widget libraries such as (gg)plotly, reactable and leaflet. Moreover, crosstalk comes with filter inputs like sliders, select boxes and checkboxes. Therefore, dynamic interaction and filtering of linked plots, maps, and tables is possible all from R and without having to significantly alter your workflow.
It is certainly not a magic wand. The set of features is limited compared to, for example, shiny. In addition, large datasets can cause problems as all data needs to be included in the html file and R’s widget libraries used with crosstalk need to be changed so that they become crosstalk compatible. Finally, for an R user, it may be frustrating not to be able to use R for the user triggered action.

Nevertheless, for some workflows, crosstalk can be a great solution that can deliver insights quickly without having to worry too much about how to set up the appropriate infrastructure.