Hello, World!

Introduction

Hello, and welcome to my new website. I will briefly lay out my MO in this post. The primary reason why I switched from my old academic website in favor of a more functional (modern?) version is one of pure convenience. Nowadays, I have been building interactive web applications, mainly Shiny apps and dashboards, for work and as a hobby. Consequently, I needed a central hub to host all the apps in one outlet.¹ Hopefully, there will also be occassional data visualization posts, as well as passing around code in R and Python.

About the Website

This webpage is built by using the blogdown package in R. In turn, the package utilizes a static-site generator called Hugo, and I use a variation of the theme cactus plus. As per the recommendation of Amber Thomas and Yihui Xie,² I host my site on netlify.com, which offers continuous deployment from a git repository. All I have to do is to create a new Markdown/RMarkdown document and within seconds it will be deployed to the website. Pretty neat.

RMarkdown

Speaking of RMarkdown, the logo of the website is created using the sunburstR package. The data shown are not artifically constructed; the graph indeed shows the breakdown of female author inclusion patterns in IR syllabi at the LSE for the 2015-2016 academic year. Hovering on the dial will display a breadcrumb trail on the top. Below you can find the R code used to generate the graph:

library(readr)
library(RColorBrewer)
library(sunburstR)
library(htmlwidgets)

patch <- read_csv("patch.csv") #Sequence data for included publications written by female authors

#Assigning palettes to vectors so that we can ignore extremely light/dark colors via subsetting later

blues <- c(brewer.pal(9, "Blues"))
reds <- c(brewer.pal(9, "Reds"))

htmlwidgets::onRender(
      sunburst(patch, count = TRUE,
               legend = list(w = 150, h = 25, s = 5, t = 25),
               breadcrumb = list(w = 0, h = 25, s = 5, t = 10),
               colors = c("", blues[1:8], reds[7:2]), #For some reason, I had to assign a blank color first for
               #the palette sequences to work as intended
               legendOrder = c("1960", "1970", "1980", "1990", "2000", "2010",
                               "Book", "Article",
                               "OtherPublisher", "TopPublisher",
                               "CoAuthored", "SingleAuthored",
                               "MaleCoAuthor", "FemaleCoAuthor")),
      "
      function(el, x){
      d3.select(el).select('.sunburst-togglelegend').property('checked',true);
      d3.select(el).select('.sunburst-togglelegend').on('click')();
      }
      "
    )

The JavaScript code chunk at the end is supposed to simulate a click so that the legend box is checked and expanded automatically on launch, however it stopped working for me after a while (so you have to toggle it manually). Maybe a package update to htmlwidgets or sunburstR somehow broke it? Still, I left it in there in case you want to work it out yourself.