HW11: Build a Shiny application

Overview

Due by 11:59pm on December 6th.

Accessing the hw11 repository

Go here and find your copy of the hw11 repository. It follows the naming convention hw11-<USERNAME>. Clone the repository to your computer.

What we’ve done

We created a Shiny app that lets you search through and generate information on city of Chicago wage employees. We used the employees-wage.csv data file and this code for our app.

What you need to do

Option A - extend the Chicago employees app

The app is functional, but is also missing a major segment of employees in the city: salaried employees. For the homework, you need to revise the app to incorporate salaried employees and present information relevant to both sets of employees (use the employees-all.csv file). Consider drawing inspiration from the city’s employee dashboard. Potential features could be (but are not limited to):

  • Separate filters for salaries and hourly wages
  • Tabset layouts
  • Use the DT package to present an employee-level table of results in an interative table.
  • Visually improve the appearance of the plots (adjust the themes, color palettes, add labels, etc.)
  • Show the number of results found whenever the filters change. For example, when searching for employees in the department of finance, the app would show the text “We found 560 employees matching these criteria”
  • Experiment with packages that add extra features to Shiny, such as shinyjs, leaflet, shinydashboard, shinythemes, ggvis
  • Implement the app using a flexdashboard format
  • If you know CSS, add CSS to make your app look nicer
  • Allow the user to download the results table as a .csv file

Option B - create a new Shiny app

This app can use an entirely different dataset. Perhaps write an app to explore the gapminder dataset, or use your own data set (maybe you collected it for another assignment). The sky is the limit here, so be creative! Or be simple to minimize your workload over the next week. But the more creative your effort, the more points awarded.

Expectations for your app

Regardless of which option you select, you must do the following things:

  1. Your app should be deployed online on shinyapps.io. Make sure your app actually works online (sometimes your app will work in RStudio but will have errors on shinyapps.io - make sure you deploy early and often to make debugging easier).
  2. Update the README.md file in your homework repo. In it you should describe your app and add a link to the URL where the app is hosted.
  3. Include the code for your Shiny app in your repository so we can evaluate it.

Submit the assignment

Your assignment submission includes two components:

  1. A working Shiny app hosted on shinyapps.io
  2. A GitHub repo that includes the underlying source code which created the app.

Follow instructions on homework workflow.

Rubric

Needs improvement: The deployed app does not work or results in many errors. There is no README file describing what the app does.

Satisfactory: Shiny app runs. The README file describes either a new app or 3+ additions to our Chicago wage employees app. Whatever is described in the README is actually implemented in the app.

Excellent: Amazing Shiny app. Lots of new features or a very cool new app idea. App looks great visually.

Benjamin Soltoff
Benjamin Soltoff
Lecturer in Information Science