TV shows rated by episode as a Shiny App

A few days ago there was an interesting R based article by diffuseprior on the decline and fall in the quality of The Simpsons

The author scraped results from GEOS, an online survey of TV programs, and applied the R package changepoint to offer an analysis of the show over time

This seemed a candidate for a Shiny App, as there are another gross of shows on GEOS. 24 follows a similar pattern to ‘The Simpsons’  although this well-defined decline is by no means universal

.  Although using this app multiplies the quantity of charts available, its automation precludes some of the difficult-to-accomplish, data munging done in the original post e.g excluding specials. This will cause some distortion

I have adapted diffuseprior’s code in a few respects

1. I used the the readHTMLTable from the XML package as the data is contained in a tabular form
2. I used ggplot for the graph rather than base plot. This took a bit more work but enabled me to  display visually the relative number of voters for each episode of a show
3. It is now available as a Shiny App , covering 145 shows, with any new GEOS votes incorporated in real-time

The code is available as a gist 5498431 (2903)