I recently posted an article on how to collate Wikipedia page views

As there is a time component to this, it seemed appropriate to use the googleVis Package to visualize changes in page hits in the Google Motion chart

For this exercise, I ran the wikiFun function covered in the last post to collate page visits for the main Republican candidates for the Presidency. There are a couple of points worth mentioning so I have incorporated the relevant code

 
library(googleVis)
 
# dataframe, GOPdata, has daily Wikipedia page views for leading candidates from beginning of 2011
 
# create and plot chart locally
myChart <- gvisMotionChart(GOPdata, idvar="name", timevar="date")
plot(myChart)
 
# set preferred initial state (e.g line rather than bubble chart etc.) then from
#Settings(the wrench) > Advanced > Advanced copy the state string to a variable
 
# enclose the copied string in single quotes exactly as below
initState <- ' 
  {"nonSelectedAlpha":0.4,"yZoomedDataMin":0,"yLambda":0,"yZoomedDataMax":600000,
   "xZoomedIn":false,"xZoomedDataMin":0,"yZoomedIn":false,"time":"2011","playDuration":15000,
   "orderedByY":false,"sizeOption":"_UNISIZE","iconKeySettings":[{"key":{"dim0":"Mitt Romney"}}],
   "xLambda":1,"colorOption":"_UNIQUE_COLOR","duration":{"multiplier":1,"timeUnit":"D"},
   "yAxisOption":"2","dimensions":{"iconDimensions":["dim0"]},"iconType":"VBAR",
   "uniColorForNonSelected":false,"orderedByX":true,"xZoomedDataMax":9,"showTrails":false,
   "xAxisOption":"2"}
'
 
# reproduce chart with
myChart <- gvisMotionChart(GOPdata, idvar="name", timevar="date", options=list(state=initState))
plot(myChart) 
 
# copy the chart html to a file
cat(myChart$html$chart, file="GOP2012.html")

The html can then be massaged as required and uploaded. I would normally post this on this blog but I had difficulties using the suggested custom fields plugin and , in any case, it would probably be too large. It can be viewed here
N.B. Flash needs to be installed to view Google Charts

The graph reflects the changes in fortune of the participants quite well with eight different candidates having at least six days at the top. Now the election is nigh, however, Romney is outpacing his closest rival 10:1 (104)

Related posts:

1. Notes on a Scandal – When Jimmy beat Katy No the title doesn’t refer to how Katy Perry suffered at another of Jimmy Savile’s sexual predelictions, although these are two of  the participants. I’ll get to the details...
2. giRls Rule ‘Expansed’ recently posted a blog article on visualising Wikipedia search statistics with R I have adapted his great script to compare the number of wiki hits four of the top...
3. Margins of Victory This is a repost from a few days ago that I am using as my introduction to the R-bloggers site. Having experimented with R lately, I have decided to add...