Dynamic Business Intelligence Apps in R with Shiny and mapgl

This 2.5 hour workshop will give you the tools to build dynamic and fast business intelligence applications using R, Shiny, and the brand-new mapgl R package. mapgl is designed to empower your Shiny development, and this workshop will contain insights not found anywhere else.

In the first hour, you'll gain the skills necessary to build high-performance web mapping apps with Mapbox and MapLibre from the comfort of R and Shiny. Add performant layers to your maps, and use Shiny's interactivity to create smooth map animations for your users.

The second hour will delve deeper into special functionality built-in to mapgl to help you achieve native JavaScript-level performance in your Shiny apps. You'll learn how to dynamically query and re-style your data on the fly, and build business intelligence tools that help users query and interact with your data with no performance lag.

We cover three "mini-projects" in the workshop to help you learn how to use mapgl in Shiny. You'll create an animated "globe explorer" app; you'll build apps to analyze data for the 2020 US Presidential election; and you'll create a business intelligence tool for a coffee shop chain.

The last part of the workshop was a live question-and-answer session where participants asked a wide range of questions about R, Shiny, and mapgl.

What you'll get:

• Unlimited access to the workshop recording and chat log for future use;
• A step-by-step annotated tutorial in Quarto format to help you build your knowledge.

About the instructor:

Kyle Walker is an internationally-recognized researcher, consultant, and software developer in the field of spatial data science, and was the 2022 recipient of the Spatial Data Scientist of the Year award from the software company CARTO. He is the author of the book Analyzing US Census Data: Methods, Maps, and Models in R, and has published several popular software packages for spatial data science in R and Python including tidycensus that have been collectively downloaded over 1 million times.

What past workshop participants have said:

"I wanted to thank you for the amazing R mapping trainings you provided. They were extremely helpful and sparked some very exciting ideas about how our center can use these resources."

"One thing that really stood out was how you shared your own workflow through real-life examples. Seeing the direct application of tidycensus to our day-to-day tasks was a game-changer. It’s safe to say that we’re all feeling a lot more confident about integrating these techniques into our work."

"Your assistance in streamlining some of our existing workflows was a huge bonus. It’s not just the “how-to” that’s valuable, but also the practical insights you provided."

"Your excitement about the whole topic was infectious. It’s not easy to keep a group engaged... but you nailed it. Your enthusiasm made a huge difference."