Abstract
We all use statistical graphics, but how do we know that the graphics we use are communicating properly? By tracking different forms of human interaction with charts, we can conduct graphical testing in order to understand the perception of statistical graphs. For instance, we could ask participants to identify differences in graphs or predict the next few observations. The advancement of graphing software provides the tools necessary to develop new methods of testing statistical graphics. In particular, Data Driven Documents (D3) is a JavaScript-based graphing framework that facilitates user interaction. A challenge of working with D3 is the environment necessary to display the graphics and images. The r2d3 package provides an efficient integration of D3 visuals into familiar R HTML formats. Our research is intended to implement ‘You Draw It,’ an interactive feature adapted from the New York Times, as a way to measure the patterns we see in data. We integrate D3 visual source code into an R shiny application in order to allow for user interaction and data collection. In this presentation, I will provide an overview of integrating D3 and R shiny as well as technical details for implementing ‘You Draw It’. I will then share results from our study conducted to validate ‘You Draw It’ as a method for graphical testing. In the future, we intend to create an R package designed for easy implementation of ‘You Draw It’ task plots in order to make this tool accessible to other researchers.