Web Based Data Visualisation (or how you'll learn to love making websites!)

Why?

Sooo ... why would you make things hard for yourself? When you can python away or hack away in Matlab or RStudio, why would we turn our data visualisation problem into a "learning to make a web page" problem? Geek masochism? Perhaps. The real answer though is far more intimidating ... power! Like force lightening power.

At what cost?

Not much.

First, Plotly is universal.
Before diving in, recall the universality of Plotly. The Plotly side of things is essentially the same as what you would have learnt using Plotly with python/Matlab/R. Plotly works the same way and with the same logic using javascript as with the other programming languages.

Second, making your own web page is much more within your grasp than you realise. The basics of make a web page with some text, pictures and getting it online, is really quite easy and straight forward.

Third, interactivity is just like what you're used to in python/Matlab/R. When it comes to getting some advanced interatcivity going, the required programming skill is the same as what you have for your data analysis in python/R/Matlab. Functions and variables, and a for loop or two. Chances are you already know everything you need. What you do need is to learn some new tools and concepts.

How much power?

You can learn to make dynamic and interactive data exploration apps. That anyone can use. And that is shareable merely through a URL.

Once you're making a web page, you can set up buttons and sliders that trigger whatever you need to do to your data or your plots.

You can allow users to click or hover over your plots, clicking a specific data point, for instance, which then trigger meaningfull changes to the data or create new plots to further explot the data.

What's involved

HTML

This is the easy stuff. It's not real programming. With this you set up your text and pictures and titles and fonts and colours. I like to think of it as lego.

Javascript

This is the magic. Javascript is the programming language for websites. It is much like python/Matlab/R. But, it is built to create the interactivity we want from a webpage.

Github Pages

Github is used for a number of things. For us, they provide a very straightforward way to put our website online without us having to worry for a second about servers or anything like that.