Workshop date and times:

The workshop will be held live online via a Webex meeting on Saturday, June 6 2020.

The meeting times across the country and the online link are found here

Preparing for the workshop

Please follow these instructions for downloading loon before the workshop. Download again the night before the workshop in case there have been updates.


Abstract

“Exposure, the effective laying open of the data to display the unanticipated, is to us a major portion of data analysis.” … John Tukey and Martin Wilk (1966)

This workshop will demonstrate the power of highly interactive visualization tools in exploratory data analysis. Through a variety of “hands-on” analyses in R, workshop participants will develop a facility for interactive exploratory data visualization using loon and related R packages.

loon is an interactive visualization toolkit for analysts/users/developers engaged in open-ended, creative, and possibly unscripted data exploration. Loon’s base set of plots include scatterplots, histograms, barplots, pairs plots, parallel and radial axes plots, graph structures, and any combination of these.

Among the topics that will be covered are the following

In this workshop, participants will become familiar with loon’s functionality through a series of examples and hands-on exercises. These will cover a wide spectrum of applications beginning with data analysis, including high-dimensional exploratory data analysis, methodological exploration for the classroom or research, as well as exploratory prototyping of new interactive visualizations.

All R code will be provided. No previous exposure to interactive graphics or loon is expected. Even participants who have never used R will be able explore data using loon and will get some appreciation of the value of interactive data visualization. The main personal requirement is an interest in data and its exploration.

Participants will of course need access to their own computer and (ideally) two screens (or one really big one). You do need to check and prepare your computing environment prior to the workshop.


Instructor

Wayne Oldford is a Professor of Statistics at the University of Waterloo and will look something like this during the workshop:

Some introductory notes and videos on loon

The workshop will consist of two 2 hour blocks with lots of opportunities for you to see how you might make use of loon as a data analysis tool as well as a research tool in data visualization.


Presentation material

Please follow these instructions for downloading loon before the workshop.

The workshop will have two parts of about 2 hours each. Material is consists mainly of R scripts (below) and a few slides.

Since this is the first time for this material AND the first time trying to work through it in a large online group, I am not sure where the material will break according to the parts. I am also not sure whether there is too much material or too little material. I am trying to not go into too much depth in the workshop, assuming that loon is new to pretty much everyone. We do not need to cover it all, and we can always do more on the fly if there is interest and time. We can also end early.

So please take this as a rough guess at how the material may divide between parts.

By then we should be exhausted. At least I will be. :-)