Visualizing ggplot2 internals with shiny and D3 by Carson Sievert.
From the post:
As I started this project, I became frustrated trying to understand/navigate through the nested list-like structure of ggplot objects. As you can imagine, it isn’t an optimal approach to print out the structure everytime you want to checkout a particular element. Out of this frustration came an idea to build this tool to help interact with and visualize this structure. Thankfully, my wonderful GSoC mentor Toby Dylan Hocking agreed that this project could bring value to the ggplot2 community and encouraged me to pursue it.
By default, this tool presents a radial Reingold–Tilford Tree of this nested list structure, but also has options to use the collapsable or cartesian versions. It also leverages the shinyAce package which allows users to send arbitrary ggplot2 code to a shiny server thats evaluate the results and re-renders the visuals. I’m quite happy with the results as I think this tool is a great way to quickly grasp the internal building blocks of ggplot(s). Please share your thoughts below!
I started with the blog post about the visualization but seeing the visualization is more powerful:
Visualizing ggplot2 internals (demo)
I rather like the radial layout.
For either topic map design or analysis, this looks like a good technique to explore the properties we assign to subjects.