Animated choropleths using animation, ggplot2, rCharts, googleVis and Shiny to visualize violent crime rates in different US States across 5 decades

UPDATE: THE BLOG/SITE HAS MOVED TO GITHUB. THE NEW LINK FOR THE BLOG/SITE IS patilv.github.io and THE LINK TO THIS POST IS: http://bit.ly/1jccIBN. PLEASE UPDATE ANY BOOKMARKS YOU MAY HAVE.

This post uses animated choropleths to visualize violent crime rates in different US States across 5 decades (1961-2010). Data are retrieved from Quandl.  Animation of rCharts and googleVis based choropleths is done in the shiny server environment and ggplot2 based choropleths are animated using the animation package. [Even though using shiny for ggplot2 based choropleths would've greatly reduced the effort required, the animation package usage made the effort worthwhile.] Rest of this post is generated using slidify and the code for doing so can be found on github. [In an update on 19 Jan, I had to move the shiny app to a different server because of some "technical glitches" with the previous server. All should be well now with the revised code and server.]