Generating an interactive Gantt/timeline chart in R

Wikipedia describes a Gantt chart as "illustrate the start and finish dates of the terminal elements and summary elements of a project". These charts are used to track the progress of a project displayed against time. The first Gantt chart was developed by Karol Adamiecki in 1890.

Even though the most important application of Gantt charts is in project management, they have been applied in visualization to represent the following:

• Historical era of artist

• Periods during which baseball players are disabled

• Vanishing Wall Street firms

Getting ready

To generate a timeline plot, we will need to install and load the googleVis package in R.

How to do it…

We would import our data in R using the read.csv() function. The gvisTimeline() function requires the dates to be in date format in R. Hence, we use the as.POSIXct() and as.Character() functions to re-define a new data frame:

base = read.csv("disable.csv")
data = data.frame(position = as.character(base...