VOSONDash

VOSONDash is an interactive R Shiny web application for the visualisation and analysis of social network data. The app has a dashboard layout with sections for visualising and manipulating network graphs, performing text analysis, displaying network metrics and the collection of network data using the vosonSML R package.

Installation

VOSONDash is an R package and must be installed before the app can be run.

Install the latest release via GitHub:

install.packages("https://github.com/vosonlab/VOSONDash/releases/download/v0.4.4/VOSONDash-0.4.4.tar.gz", 
  repo = NULL, type = "source")

[not yet available, coming soon…] Install the latest release via CRAN:

install.packages("VOSONDash")

Install the latest development version:

# library(devtools)

devtools::install_github("vosonlab/VOSONDash")

Once the VOSON Dashboard package is installed and loaded the Shiny web application can be run from the RStudio console using the runVOSONDash() function.

library(VOSONDash)

runVOSONDash()

Running the app for the first time

When run the VOSONDash app will check that all of the R packages that are required to make it work are installed. It is likely that some packages will be missing and the app will print a message indicating the missing packages and a command that can be used to install them.

For example:

> runVOSONDash()
=================================================
VOSONDash v0.4.4
01 Aug 2019 09:35

...

Checking packages...

Error: Required packages missing.
- visNetwork
- syuzhet

The missing packages can be installed using the provided package install command.

Please install required packages before using VOSONDash:

install.packages(c("visNetwork","syuzhet"))

After installing required packages and running again the VOSONDash Shiny app will open up in the default web browser.

VOSON Dashboard

VOSONDash features an intuitive web interface with a section for ‘Analysis’ of graph data loaded from igraph objects and a section for the ‘Collection’ of social media data using vosonSML.

Analysis

Network and text analysis of graph data.

• Network Graphs: Visualise and modify networks
• Network Metrics: Calculate node and network level metrics
• Text Analysis: Word frequency, word clouds and sentiment
• Assortativity: Calculate homogeneity and homophily indexes (if VOSON categorical node attributes present)

Fig 1. Environmental activist site hyperlink network loaded from a graphml file and plotted by the visNetwork package.

Collection

Graphical interfaces for collecting network data from social media API’s.

• Collect: Twitter, youtube and reddit network data
• API Keys: Enter, save, load API keys and create access tokens

Fig 2. Collection of recent #auspol tweets and generation of an actor network with the vosonSML package.

Special thanks

This application would not be possible without key packages by other authors in the R community, particularly the shiny, shinydashboard, DT and shinyjs packages. Graph visualisations created with igraph and visNetwork, and text analysis with support from tm, SnowballC, wordcloud and syuzhet packages.