The Shiny Season

Campus has been deserted. Except for admin, construction workers, and a few lone graduate students. Now that all of the undergrads are gone and half of the school is at AGU, Environment Hall is quiet. Our office seems to be functioning as it should, tiny bursts of typing here and there. With less people around to (help) distract me from the days work, my mind wanders to the fun things we will be doing together this spring. The annual River Retreat is just around the corner, in a few more days a dense reading list will be finalized. The topic of last year’s river retreat was Scarcity, this year “Structure and Function”. Who will be the lucky one to write up the post about those forthcoming discussions?

An example of what you can do with the geospatial visualization tools in R- topographic change over time due to Mountain top mining by Matt Ross.
An example of what you can do with the geospatial visualization tools in R- click to watch the topographic change over time due to Mountain top mining (created by Matt Ross).

 

We have some other great events to look forward to in January as well, namely learning how to use geospatial data to make cool data visualizations like the one shown here (click on it to watch the time lapse). This fall Matt Ross and Aaron Berdanier began a working group to use GitHub and make Shiny apps. I had no idea what either of these things were before they proposed teaching us about them. Shiny is a really great way to use R to make interactive web applications, and GitHub is a version control system and online repository for scripts and tools for data analysis. Many of us will be working on our own Shiny apps this spring, but in the mean time check out Matt’s Shiny application, and resources that we’ve posted on the River Center website.