Mapping With Shapefiles in R – Getting Started
Geographic data is often available as a shapefile, and there’s plenty of heavy software to get that data in a map. R is an open source option, and as a bonus, much of the work can be done in a few lines of code.
When you use shapefiles, the geography is encoded in the data, so you don’t have to deal with some of the finickiness in R mapping. In this tutorial, you learn how to load shapefiles, make maps, and then customize.
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About the Author
Nathan Yau is a statistician who works primarily with visualization. He earned his PhD in statistics from UCLA, is the author of two best-selling books — Data Points and Visualize This — and runs FlowingData. Introvert. Likes food. Likes beer.
