I’m always looking for ways to make my science more interactive with the public. What better way then to visualise your data and to make them dynamic and playable! I recently found out about Plot.ly, a website that enables you to create very beautiful plots that are fully customisable and embeddable and allow manipulation and interaction from your website visitors.

What I particularly like is its link with ggplot2 in R. With some simple lines of code you can easily make a plot you created for your scientific publication interactive and online. As an example, I will create an online interactive version of one of the plots in my recent paper on leadership in sticklebacks:

Here is the online interactive version. Hover over the point and try to drag the plot or zoom in and out:

And here is the original version:

This plot shows that the number of trips focal fish went out of cover and joined their partner (following) was positively related to the boldness of their current partner. Boldness scores and the nr of following trips were square-root transformed

In my follow-up post I will explain how to create such a plot yourself!