R – Paolo Eusebi 2019-06-24 03:28:36

Wow! I was listening a recent episode of the “Storytelling with data” podcast by Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic. It was an interview with Alberto Cairo who came up recommending an awesome tool for data visualization: iNZight!

Interestingly iNZight is entirely based on R code and in its latest releases it speaks tidyverse language and some features are much improved! ggplot2 is the basis for the plotting environment.

iNZight was initially designed for New Zealand high schools, aiming at educating students to effectively explore data and understand some statistical concepts.

The development team should be very familiar to R users!

As I said, iNZight it’s now really powerful and has lot of features and can handle multivariate, time series and complex survey data.

Of course, iNZight is free and it’s easy downloadable and usable in many platforms and devices. In fact, there is a Desktop version that can be installed on Mac, Windows or Linux but also a Tablet version.

I have started with the classical gapminder dataset, which is readily available as example in the app), because I wanted to play a little with the software using very well-know data. In few steps I succeeded in creating a nice plot saved in a static (tiff, png, pdf, jpeg) and interactive version (html). I plotted mobile subscribers versus income in 2008. In the interactive version the user can navigate the visualization clicking each point and labels highlithing graph portions and getting detailed information.

The interactive version of the graph lets query it in various ways like hovering over points or clicking them. The plot could be downloaded as Interactive HTML files which can be given to others without any living connection with iNZight to work.