# ToOoOlTiPs: An R package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics

An abstract of less than 150 words.

Quietest Quokka https://www.britannica.com/animal/quokka (University of Little Mates) , Bounciest Bilby https://www.britannica.com/animal/bilby (University of Little Mates)
2022-08-26

# Introduction

Interactive data graphics provides plots that allow users to interact them. One of the most basic types of interaction is through tooltips, where users are provided additional information about elements in the plot by moving the cursor over the plot.

This paper will first review some R packages on interactive graphics and their tooltip implementations. A new package ToOoOlTiPs that provides customized tooltips for plot, is introduced. Some example plots will then be given to showcase how these tooltips help users to better read the graphics.

# Background

Some packages on interactive graphics include plotly (Sievert 2020) that interfaces with Javascript for web-based interactive graphics, crosstalk (Cheng and Sievert 2021) that specializes cross-linking elements across individual graphics. The recent R Journal paper tsibbletalk (Wang and Cook 2021) provides a good example of including interactive graphics into an article for the journal. It has both a set of linked plots, and also an animated gif example, illustrating linking between time series plots and feature summaries.

# Customizing tooltip design with ToOoOlTiPs

ToOoOlTiPs is a packages for customizing tooltips in interactive graphics, it features these possibilities.

# A gallery of tooltips examples

The palmerpenguins data (Horst et al. 2020) features three penguin species which has a lovely illustration by Alison Horst in Figure 1.

Figure 1: Artwork by @allison_horst

Table 1 prints at the first five rows of the `penguins` data:

Table 1: A basic table
species | island | bill_length_mm | bill_depth_mm | flipper_length_mm | body_mass_g | sex | year
--- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | ---
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.1 | 18.7 | 181 | 3750 | male | 2007
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.5 | 17.4 | 186 | 3800 | female | 2007
Adelie | Torgersen | 40.3 | 18.0 | 195 | 3250 | female | 2007
Adelie | Torgersen | NA | NA | NA | NA | NA | 2007
Adelie | Torgersen | 36.7 | 19.3 | 193 | 3450 | female | 2007
Adelie | Torgersen | 39.3 | 20.6 | 190 | 3650 | male | 2007

Figure 2 shows an interactive plot of the penguins data, made using the plotly package.

    p <- penguins %>%
      ggplot(aes(x = bill_depth_mm, y = bill_length_mm,
                 color = species)) +
      geom_point()
    ggplotly(p)

Figure 2: A basic interactive plot made with the plotly package on palmer penguin data. Three species of penguins are plotted with bill depth on the x-axis and bill length on the y-axis. When hovering on a point, a tooltip will show the exact value of the bill depth and length for that point, along with the species name.

# Summary

We have displayed various tooltips that are available in the package ToOoOlTiPs.

## CRAN packages used

ToOoOlTiPs, plotly, crosstalk, tsibbletalk, palmerpenguins, ggplot2

## CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Spatial, TeachingStatistics, TimeSeries, WebTechnologies

J. Cheng and C. Sievert. crosstalk: Inter-widget interactivity for HTML widgets. 2021. URL https://CRAN.R-project.org/package=crosstalk. R package version 1.1.1.
A. M. Horst, A. P. Hill and K. B. Gorman. palmerpenguins: Palmer archipelago (antarctica) penguin data. 2020. URL https://allisonhorst.github.io/palmerpenguins/. R package version 0.1.0.
C. Sievert. Interactive Web-Based Data Visualization with r, plotly, and shiny. Chapman; Hall/CRC, 2020. URL https://plotly-r.com.
E. Wang and D. Cook. Conversations in time: Interactive visualisation to explore structured temporal data. The R Journal, 2021. URL https://journal.r-project.org/archive/2021/RJ-2021-050/index.html.

### References

### Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

### Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

    Quokka & Bilby, "ToOoOlTiPs: An R package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics", The R Journal, 2022

BibTeX citation

    @article{paper-with-errors,
      author = {Quokka, Quietest and Bilby, Bounciest},
      title = {ToOoOlTiPs: An R package for Customizable Tooltips in Interactive Graphics},
      journal = {The R Journal},
      year = {2022},
      note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/paper-with-errors},
      doi = {10.32614/paper-with-errors},
      issn = {2073-4859},
      pages = {1}
    }