Are you interested in exploring and understanding your data? Would you like to communicate your R analysis in an easy to use, interactive way? Shiny is an R package that makes it simple to build and share web applications for the purpose of visualizing and communicating your data interactively. Join JHU Data Services for a workshop introducing the Shiny package in R for developing and sharing interactive data visualizations. In this two-part hands-on session, we’ll cover design concepts of interactive data visualizations and build a Shiny web app from scratch using a prepared dataset. Some prior experience in R is required.
Website: dataservices.library.jhu.edu/
Contact us: dataservices@jhu.edu
JHU Data Services, part of the Johns Hopkins University Sheridan Libraries, helps the JHU community find, use, visualize, manage, and share data. We offer live webinars and self-paced online trainings on computational research and coding, GIS, data management, data visualization, and more. See all of our training topics on our website.
This repository contains materials for one of our live webinars open to JHU students, faculty, and staff. Please contact us with any questions.
See our calendar to register for upcoming workshops.
To follow along during the workshop, please complete the following setup steps in advance of tomorrows workshop:
Make sure you have downloaded and installed the following:
- R – https://cran.r-project.org/
- RStudio – https://posit.co/download/rstudio-desktop/ (select the Download button next to "2: Install RStudio")
If it's been a while since you've used R or RStudio, no worries! Just check your version numbers and consider updating if you're several versions behind.
We'll be using three R packages in this workshop. Please install them before the workshop starts, as some can take a few minutes to download.
- ggplot2 – create data visualizations in R 📊
- palmerpenguins – contains the dataset we'll be visualizing 🐧
- RColorBrewer – provides color-blind-friendly color palettes 🎨
- shiny – build interactive dashboards in R 💎
- bslib – configure the look and feel of our dashboards 🖼️
Not sure if you've already installed these? Run library(package_name) to check. If you get an error, install them by opening RStudio and running:
install.packages("ggplot2")
install.packages("palmerpenguins")
install.packages("RColorBrewer")
install.packages("shiny")
install.packages("bslib")You'll need to switch between presentation slides and RStudio during the workshop. We recommend either connecting a second monitor or placing two windows side by side on your screen.
- PresentationMaterials: This folder contains PowerPoint slides and other presentation materials used in the workshop
- Resources: This folder contains cheatsheets to assist you during the workshop and links to external sources for you to continue your learning
If you have taken the live webinar for this class, please take this survey: Interactive Data Visualization in R with Shiny Survey
The presentation materials are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0), attributable to Data Services, Johns Hopkins University.
See LICENSE file for additional code licensing and re-use information.
The images, external resources, and cheatsheets linked in this repository may have other licenses and terms of use.
Please cite this material as:
Johns Hopkins University Data Services. March 24th and 25th, 2026. Interactive Data Visualization in R with Shiny. https://github.com/jhu-data-services/interactive-data-vis-shiny