Oxford Roman Economy Project Case Study

The Oxford Roman Economy Project is funded through the generosity of Baron Lorne Thyssen, previously the AHRC, to study and curate the fundamentals of the Roman imperial project across all major economic activities. This case study sought to investigate the cartographic and comparative visualisation capabilities of shiny as a tool for exploring two subsets of the OxRep database - shipwrecks and mines.

OxRep aims to make its vast database of Roman coins explorable through maps & charts. This case study looks at coins from shipwrecks & mines

These visualisations were built using R and Shiny, here's a basic overview of what Shiny is.

The Oxford Roman Economy Project wanted to modernise their website and integrate interactive views to their underlying database, without needing to seek the support of a web developer, and sought advice from the IT Research Support Team. Shiny was advertised as a possible solution, as this would allow researchers in the team already familiar with R to maintain and update the interactive components over time.

These shiny apps uses the following visualisations:

  • Gantt/timeline chart - useful for comparing how data changes over time.
  • Interactive tables - useful to provide an interactive window to data
  • Geo scatter plots - useful for dispalying the position of items on a map

To replicate this interactive visualisation for yourself, refer to the IDN Shiny app template or else fork the actual code for the shiny app here. You an also contact the IDN on researchsupport@it.ox.ac.uk

Case Study Details

Academic

Angela Trentacoste

Nicholas Ray

Department Faculty of Classics
Divison Humanities
Where is visualisation used? Upcoming Oxford Roman Economy website
Data Source Oxford Roman Economy Project Database
Link(s) to code http://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.5555398
Developer Martin Hadley (http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3039-6849)