Quick example of a Shiny app for explorer a dump of Guardian 2014 university rankings data

global.R

#Here's a way of grabbing down the data - it probably makes sense to grab a local copy...
library(RCurl)
gsqAPI = function(key,query,gid=0){
  #tmp=getURL( paste( sep="",'https://spreadsheets.google.com/tq?', 'tqx=out:csv','&tq=', curlEscape(query), '&key=', key, '&gid=', gid), ssl.verifypeer = FALSE )
  tmp=getURL( paste( sep="",'https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/',key,'/gviz/tq?tqx=out:csv','&tq=', curlEscape(query),'&gid=', gid), ssl.verifypeer = FALSE )
  return( read.csv( textConnection( tmp ),  stringsAsFactors=F ) )
}

handler=function(key,i){
  tmp=gsqAPI(key,"select * where B!=''", i)
  subject=sub(".Rank",'',colnames(tmp)[1])
  colnames(tmp)[1]="Subject.Rank"
  tmp$subject=subject
  tmp
}

#key='0Aq73qj3QslDedHFNdUsxOVZQZ1dmbXNrYlZGUWgwdHc'
key='1KpjH0-W1kwlnu_INYtSntGzrrfqqiJ12rS2Lk7um-iQ'
gdata=handler(key,2)

for (i in 3:47){
  gdata=rbind(gdata,handler(key,i))
}

#save(gdata,file="guardian2014unidata.Rda")
#Or just load the data in if you have saved it previously...
#load("guardian2014unidata.Rda")

gdata[, 4:11] <- sapply(gdata[, 4:11], as.numeric)
gdata$Name.of.Institution=as.factor(gdata$Name.of.Institution)
gdata$subject=as.factor(gdata$subject)

server.R

library(shiny)
library(ggplot2)

# Define server logic
shinyServer(function(input, output) {
  
  #Simple test plot
  output$testPlot = renderPlot( {
    pdata=subset(gdata, Name.of.Institution==input$tbl)
    #g=ggplot(pdata) + geom_text(aes(x=X..Satisfied.with.Teaching,y=X..Satisfied.with.Assessment,label=subject,size=Value.added.score.10))
    g=ggplot(pdata) + geom_text(aes_string(x=input$tblx,y=input$tbly,size=input$tbls, label='subject'))
    g=g+labs(title=paste("Guardian University Tables 2014:",input$tbl))
    print(g)
  })
  
  
})

ui.R

library(shiny)

uList=levels(gdata$Name.of.Institution)
names(uList) = uList

cList=colnames(gdata[c(1,3:11)])
names(cList) = cList

# Define UI for application that plots random distributions 
shinyUI(pageWithSidebar(
  
  
  # Application title
  headerPanel("Guardian 2014 University Tables Explorer"),
  
  sidebarPanel(
    #Just a single selector here - which table do you want to view?
    selectInput("tbl", "Institution:",uList),
    selectInput("tblx", "x axis:",cList,selected = 'X..Satisfied.with.Teaching'),
    selectInput("tbly", "y axis:",cList,selected='X..Satisfied.with.Assessment'),
    selectInput("tbls", "Label size:",cList,selected = 'Value.added.score.10'),
    
    div("This demo provides a crude graphical view over data extracted from",
        a(href='http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2013/jun/04/university-guide-2014-table-rankings',
          "Guardian Datablog: University guide 2014 data tables") )
    
  ),
  
  #The main panel is where the "results" charts are plotted
  mainPanel(
    plotOutput("testPlot")#,
    #tableOutput("view")
    
  )
))