A legendary tale says that Michelangelo found his Moses so real; and shouted at him "Why don’t you speak?!" Seeing that it wouldn’t, he slammed it down with his hammer.

Michelangelo's Mosè. Picture by Jörg Bittner Unna, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=46476418

From a similar desire of interaction, interactive visualization was born, making your data visualizations interact with you and your analysis users.

Using interactive visualizations, we can make our plots do something more than just displaying data, since we give them the ability to interact with the user, showing tooltips, navigation, and zooming controls, and even rearranging them according to users' needs and preferences.

Interactive data visualization can be useful at the beginning and at the end of your work.

At the beginning, in your exploratory data analysis job, you can leverage interactive visualizations in order to get a better understanding of your data without needing towrite a lot of code for a great number of plots.

At the end of your job, you can use interactive data visualization to better communicate your point, by showing your assumptions and their effects on your job results in a better manner.

In this chapter, you will learn some advanced techniques to produce interactive data visualization, from force networks to animated 3D plots.