An abstract of less than 150 words.
Interactive data graphics provides plots that allow users to interact them. One of the most basic types of interaction is through tooltips, where users are provided additional information about elements in the plot by moving the cursor over the plot.
This paper will first review some R packages on interactive graphics and their tooltip implementations. A new package ToOoOlTiPs that provides customized tooltips for plot, is introduced. Some example plots will then be given to showcase how these tooltips help users to better read the graphics.
Some packages on interactive graphics include plotly (Sievert 2020) that interfaces with Javascript for web-based interactive graphics, crosstalk (Cheng and Sievert 2021) that specializes cross-linking elements across individual graphics. The recent R Journal paper tsibbletalk (Wang and Cook 2021) provides a good example of including interactive graphics into an article for the journal. It has both a set of linked plots, and also an animated gif example, illustrating linking between time series plots and feature summaries.
ToOoOlTiPs is a packages for customizing tooltips in interactive graphics, it features these possibilities.
The palmerpenguins data (Horst et al. 2020) features three penguin species which has a lovely illustration by Alison Horst in Figure 1.
Figure 1: Artwork by @allison_horst
Table 1 prints at the first five
rows of the penguins
data:
species | island | bill_length_mm | bill_depth_mm | flipper_length_mm | body_mass_g | sex | year |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.1 | 18.7 | 181 | 3750 | male | 2007 |
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.5 | 17.4 | 186 | 3800 | female | 2007 |
Adelie | Torgersen | 40.3 | 18.0 | 195 | 3250 | female | 2007 |
Adelie | Torgersen | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | 2007 |
Adelie | Torgersen | 36.7 | 19.3 | 193 | 3450 | female | 2007 |
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.3 | 20.6 | 190 | 3650 | male | 2007 |
Figure 2 shows an interactive plot of the penguins data, made using the plotly package.
p <- penguins %>%
ggplot(aes(x = bill_depth_mm, y = bill_length_mm,
color = species)) +
geom_point()
ggplotly(p)
Figure 2: A basic interactive plot made with the plotly package on palmer penguin data. Three species of penguins are plotted with bill depth on the x-axis and bill length on the y-axis. When hovering on a point, a tooltip will show the exact value of the bill depth and length for that point, along with the species name.
We have displayed various tooltips that are available in the package ToOoOlTiPs.
ToOoOlTiPs, plotly, crosstalk, tsibbletalk, palmerpenguins, ggplot2
Spatial, TeachingStatistics, TimeSeries, WebTechnologies
Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".
For attribution, please cite this work as
Quokka & Bilby, "ToOoOlTiPs: An R package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics", The R Journal, 2022
BibTeX citation
@article{paper-with-errors, author = {Quokka, Quietest and Bilby, Bounciest}, title = {ToOoOlTiPs: An R package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics}, journal = {The R Journal}, year = {2022}, note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/paper-with-errors}, doi = {10.32614/paper-with-errors}, issn = {2073-4859}, pages = {1} }