Matthew Sundquist edited Plotly and Authorea.md  over 10 years ago

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# Plotly and Authorea  ## Plot.ly  Plot.ly Plotly  is a collaborative data analysis and graphing tool. It Plotly lets you access, analyze, and visualize data. Instead of collaborating by emailing a data set, script, graphs, screenshots, and explanations to your team, Plotly lets you work with others online, commenting on projects and saving revisions. Plotly also pairs data and graphs. Pairing graphs and the relevant data like this  solves three problems: a real problem; a [recent study](www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=where-have-all-the-data-gone-13-12-19) showed that, twenty years after publication in 1991, 80 percent of data used in scientific papers was no longer available. _Solution_. Plotly hosts data, code, and graphs together, and lets you fork your own versions (see _e.g.,_ [this Washington Post article](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/14/do-low-taxes-on-the-rich-leave-the-middle-class-with-lower-wages/)).  **First.** You have to use too many tools to query a database, clean data, analyze data, graph results, and share and discuss a project. _Solution_. Plotly lets you access, analyze, and visualize data.     **Second.** Collaborating requires emailing a data set, script, graphs, screenshots, and explanations to your team. _Solution_. Plotly lets you work with others online, commenting on projects and saving revisions.     **Third.** when you look at a graph in a deck or paper, you can't access the data. Time compounds the data loss; a [recent study](www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=where-have-all-the-data-gone-13-12-19) showed that, twenty years after publication in 1991, 80 percent of data used in scientific papers was no longer available. _Solution_. Plotly hosts data, code, and graphs together, and lets you fork your own versions (see _e.g.,_ [this Washington Post article](http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/06/14/do-low-taxes-on-the-rich-leave-the-middle-class-with-lower-wages/)).     **More details.** **How it works.**  Plotly offers a) a graphing GUI with bubble charts, box plots, line charts, area charts, scatter plots, histograms, 2D histograms, heatmaps, log axes, error bars, date axes, multiple axes, subplots, and insets b) [Plotly APIs](Plot.ly/api) for Python, R, MATLAB, REST, Julia, Arduino, and Perl, c) a Python sandbox and support for NumPy, LaTeX, pandas, datetime, and [IPython Notebook](nbviewer.ipython.org/github/plotly/IPython-plotly/tree/master/) support, d) a grid with fits, functions, stats, ANOVAs, and more. ## Authorea  Authorea is a tool to write research documents in collaboration. The post you are reading was written in Authorea! Collaborating on scholarly papers with a mix of emailed documents, drafts, lost revisions, and comments is inefficient and painful. Authorea puts the whole publication tookit online: an interactive GUI, revision history, comments, and beautiful rendering for LaTeX, images, and graphs. Importantly, Authorea now allows seamless and easy inclusion of Plot.ly graphs. Here's how.  ## Plot.ly plots Plotly  inside Authorea documents Below is a graph re-made with data from UC Berkeley [stats page](http://www.stat.ubc.ca/~jenny/notOcto/STAT545A/examples/gapminder/data/gapminderDataFiveYear.txt), which plays a central role in Hans Rosling's [Ted Talks](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hVimVzgtD6w). You can also see a similar graph in [this IPython Notebook](http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/plotly/IPython-plotly/blob/master/Bubble%20Chart%20Explorer.ipynb) or lrean more in this [post](http://blog.plot.ly/post/71637573256/the-power-of-bubble-charts) on bubble charts.  If you hover your mouse over the data in the image below you can see the data points, if you drag your mouse, you'll zoom into the plot, and double click to zoom back out. All in one interface you can access the data, graph, and script used to create a graph, and if you click through, you can save, edit, and copy the script, data, or graph you see below. If you were writing this paper on Authorea, you would be able to write your text and manipulate your image at the same time, collaboratively. **That is collaboration, as it should be.**