Usually on this blog we include code and instructions from projects of our own. But in this case we wanted to bring your attention to an interesting and fun live travel map, created by Bjørn Sandvik, that makes use of some of our favorite mapping and charting tools. The tools include CartoDB (for live data […]
Continue reading →Although R has vast graphical functionality I've lamented the lack of support for additional fonts. You can spend an incredible amount of time fine-tuning a ggplot2 graphic, fiddling with the length of the tick marks, getting the legend just right but then the Helvetica text detracts from the beauty of what you've created. My understanding […]
Continue reading →When it comes to the accuracy of estimates of network distance and time between points our guess it that Google is king. Along with millions of others we trust Google to provide accurate directions. In many cases, Google Maps is the perfect tool, but there are a few instances where Google Maps is not an […]
Continue reading →CartoDB has a nice dashboard you can use to upload shapefiles for viewing online. They have even included drag-and-drop functionality to help improve the experience. Nevertheless, uploading geographic files manually can be cumbersome and you can end up forgetting files sources, when you uploaded etc. Fortunately, CartoDB recently posted a Python script that you can […]
Continue reading →ggplot2 packageOne of my favorite packages for creating maps in R is ggplot2. No matter what, though, creating maps in R is trickier than doing it in a GIS system, particularly when you don't have 'on the fly' projection as you have in both ArcGIS and QGIS. To help you create maps on your own we […]
Continue reading →This post was updated with advanced tips (at the bottom) 2/12/2016 For scientific projects we often using knitr and R markdown in RStudio to share results and code either in HTML or PDF format. These are great tools for reproducible research. We find, however, that keeping all of our R code in an R markdown […]
Continue reading →For most of our projects that involve large datasets we use either PostgreSQL or MySQL to conduct analysis and feed data-driven web sites. In general, we’re happy with these tools, particularly PostgreSQL and its spatial functionality, and find that they meet our data needs. PostgreSQL has also been fairly innovative, recently adding functionality focused on […]
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