Building on the last post: I just put together a short slideshow explaining how to use R to create Google Motion Charts with World Bank data. It uses the packages googleVis and WDI. It mostly builds on the example from Mage's Blog post. I just simplified it with the WDI package (and used national finance related variables).
I'm always looking for ways to download data from the internet into R. Though I prefer to host and access plain-text data sets (CSV is my personal favourite) from GitHub (see my short paper on the topic) sometimes it's convenient to get data stored on Dropbox . There has been a change in the way Dropbox URLs work and I just added some functionality to the repmis R package. So I though that I'ld write a quick post on how to directly download data from Dropbox into R. The download method is different depending on whether or not your plain-text data is in a Dropbox Public folder or not. Dropbox Public Folder Dropbox is trying to do away with its public folders. New users need to actively create a Public folder. Regardless, sometimes you may want to download data from one. It used to be that files in Public folders were accessible through non-secure (http) URLs. It's easy to download these into R, just use the read.table command, where the URL is the file name...
Comments
Thanks for pointing out the deck.js library. This seems to be a good solution to present results using the googleVis library. I will use your idea on my blog as well.
Regards
Markus
I got to this slideshow from the `slidify` website. I'm glad you're finding the WDI package useful!
A quick style thing: WDI will merge a bunch of indicators for you if you just feed it a vector of indicator strings. For example,
dat <- WDI(indicator=c("DT.DOD.DPNG.CD",""DT.DOD.DECT.GN.ZS"))
head(dat)
Best,
Vincent
PS: It appears we know some of the same people: Cassie G. and Bill C.
Thanks for pointing to a solution for the unnecessary verbiage.
Also, thanks for the WDI package, as a heavy user of World Bank data it is definitely helpful.
P.S. Are you going to be at APSA presenting your and Bill's fed paper?