Animated choropleths using animation, ggplot2, rCharts, googleVis and Shiny to visualize violent crime rates in different US States across 5 decades

This post uses animated choropleths to visualize violent crime rates in different US States across 5 decades (1961-2010). Data are retrieved from Quandl.  Animation of rCharts and googleVis based choropleths is done in the shiny server environment and ggplot2 based choropleths are animated using the animation package. [Even though using shiny for ggplot2 based choropleths would’ve greatly reduced the effort required, the animation package usage made the effort worthwhile.] Rest of this post is generated using slidify and the code for doing so can be found on github.