India’s Prime Ministers post Independence – an Interactive Timeline Plot

These days we often encounter visually-rich and interactive applications all over the web. TimelineJS is one of such applications which helps you to build interactive timelines on events of historical importance. And if you are more of a data visualization enthusiast, then D3 or d3.js framework would be really exciting. D3, also named Data-Driven Documents is a javascript library used extensively to create interactive and web based data visualizations. For the visualization, the data is provided by you and the documents are web-based documents based on html.

TimelineJS is one of the many D3 layouts and specific to the use of showcasing time based events over the course of history. In order to work with D3, you should be familiar with javascript and also some knowledge of html would be handy. One alternative to javascript coding would be using new R package called “rCharts” which can create, customize and publish interactive javascript visualizations. Currently it supports multiple javascript charting libraries that are part of D3 such as Polychart, Morris, NVD3, xCharts, HighCharts, Leaflet and Rickshaw. The current application on Prime Ministers of India was created with the help of rCharts and TimelineJS framework.