Your city is hosting a renaissance faire and the planning committee has come to you asking for a stylized map of the downtown. The map needs to include accurate buildings, streets, natural features, and sidewalks. Your first idea might be to trace the map using satellite imagery, and while this is doable, tracing 200 buildings […]
Continue reading →If you search the web for examples of d3 data visualizations, you can expect to find a host of charts, graphs, plots, and maps. But data visualizations don’t have to be limited to these examples. They can also include photos, drawings, and animated graphics. I will focus on using SVGs so we can manipulate […]
Continue reading →The purrr package is a functional programming superstar which provides useful tools for iterating through lists and vectors, generalizing code and removing programming redundancies. The purrr tools work in combination with functions, lists and vectors and results in code that is consistent and concise. In this post we focus primarily on the map family of […]
Continue reading →facet_wrap() and facet_grid() from ggplot2
One of the most powerful aspects of the R plotting package ggplot2 is the ease with which you can create multi-panel plots. With a single function you can split a single plot into many related plots using facet_wrap() or facet_grid(). Although creating multi-panel plots with ggplot2 is easy, understanding the difference between methods and some […]
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If you are interested in making beautiful custom data visualizations for the web, D3 and SVGs work great together. Both SVGs and D3 support interactivity and animation, offering a ton of flexibility to create unique interactive applications. Future posts will describe how to load and modify external SVGs with D3, but there are important steps […]
Continue reading →purrr functions with the furrr packageR’s purrr package is an amazing set of tools for applying a function to the items in a vector or list. Although the default for this type of operation in purrr is to run each step sequentially the furrr package makes it incredibly easy to improve performance by running the steps concurrently (in parallel). purrr […]
Continue reading →The FedData package (created by R. Kyle Bocinsky) is a great new R package that provides easy access to some important federal datasets. The package is well-designed and provides functions to download climate, elevation, hydrography and other data for your area of interest. The following five sources of data are currently available for download with […]
Continue reading →acs, tigris and leaflet packagesCensus data the hard way Plotting census data with ggplot2 Interactive plotting with the leaflet package Options 1: Convert the data.frame back to a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame Options 2: Make use of the existing SpatialPolygonsDataFrame Census data the easy(er) way 1) Set up the packages 2) Get the spatial data (tigris) 3) Get the tabular data (acs) […]
Continue reading →As readers likely know putting your data online as interactive visualizations can be a lot of work. We like to use D3, Highcharts and the Google visualization API but all of these tools require some serious programming. When you’re building a website with custom data visualization the effort might make sense, but when you have […]
Continue reading →ggplot2 cheatsheetEven the most experienced R users need help creating elegant graphics. The ggplot2 library is a phenomenal tool for creating graphics in R but even after many years of near-daily use we still need to refer to our Cheat Sheet. Up until now, we’ve kept these key tidbits on a local PDF. But for our […]
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