DR Alumni Race Results: First attempt with Shiny

I've always touted how nice Tableau can be for producing interactive graphics quickly. Although Tableau requires having a license to work with "large" datasets or connecting outside of local text files. As far as I'm concerned, Tableau is still great for quick prototyping visualizations and has a relatively cheap license. What do you do when your data is online and Tableau isn't an option?

That's when I picked up on RStudio's Shiny. Shiny is a web application framework for being able to host your R scripts online. Well, about two nights of going through their awesome tutorial and I had myself a basic working visualization using the ggplot2. I was able to make a pretty nice static visualization that could redraw based on an input string (someone's name). In order to recreate the interactivity of Tableau, I needed a different package and chose to use rCharts. rCharts allows for a nice interface to the D3 library which allows for interactive charts. Below is a simple example extending Shiny to redraw an interactive scatter plot using the Polychart.JS library. What do you think?

2014 DR XC Alumni Race Results

Well it was another fun race this year, especially with the added surprise of no water on the gas pipes. I will try and post up results here from now on along with some added analysis. I'll probably take a look at how runners progress as they get older, perhaps how course conditions affected times.

Either way, we had 15 participants this year with their times below. Please let me know if I misspelled any names.