learning_echarts4r.Rmd

# Learning echarts4r with shiny

Ethan Evans

For my Community Contribution project, I created a Shiny web-app tutorial of an interactive visualization package called echarts4r. 

The link for my tutorial site can be found [here](https://etevans.shinyapps.io/CommunityContribution/).

## Motivations

I have explored this package at a basic level in my past R experiences but not enough to appreciate its true value. In the times I have used other interactive visualization packages like plotly and htmlwidgets, I have encountered far more coding syntax issues and plot formatting issues than when I have used echarts4r. I also just think echarts4r is the most visually appealing set of graphics I have worked with across any language or software. Thus, I felt like sharing this package with a class that has some new R users would be a great opportunity for both myself and my classmates.

My tutorial addresses a few needs. First, using a Shiny web-based platform shows 
new R developers one of the ways you can deploy and view interactive visualizations. Second, this tutorial gives a simpler, more manageable overview of the package than other resources. While the documentation and vignettes online are sufficiently comprehensive, they assume a baseline level of R and visualization knowledge that my audience in our class might not have. My tutorial walks through how to build a plot from start to finish, draws comparisons to the familiar ggplot2, and then details a breadth of plots that we have learned about in class. Online echarts4r tutorials might be a bit overwhelming as well, so if viewers are interested after my baseline tutorial, they might go ahead and check out the vast resources online.

## Evaluation and Improvement

Creating this tutorial taught me a lot more about this package and reiterated how
easy and intuitive it is to learn. Also, through my deep dive of research on the
package before starting the project, I realized just how powerful and unique this
package is. I had thought that everything the package had to offer was detailed 
in the main package website; however, because it is built from Apache ECharts, all methods and functions from that library directly translate to one in echarts4r. Overall, I thought that my tutorial covers the package well and gives 
the viewer enough knowledge to start exploring on their own.

If I were to design a tutorial for echarts4r again, I would focus on depth rather than breadth. Overall, I could have spent more time giving a better explanation of the fundamentals of a plot and how to perform certain options on the plot, rather than show a dozen different types of plots. While both have their own value, learning the fundamentals of a plot seems better for a beginner tutorial.