World map of visited countries in R

Like me, if you like traveling as much as R you might want to draw a world map of the countries you have visited in R. Below an example with the countries I have visited as of January 2020: To draw this map in R, you will need the following packages: library(highcharter) library(dplyr) library(maps) As usual, you need the packages to be installed on your machine before loading them with library(). You can install a package with the command install.packages("name_of_package"). After having loaded the packages, we are going to use the dataset called iso3166 from the {maps} package and rename it dat. Here are the first 6 rows of the dataset: dat <- iso3166 head(dat) ## a2 a3 ISOname mapname sovereignty ## 1 AW ABW Aruba Aruba Netherlands ## 2 AF AFG Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan ## 3 AO AGO Angola Angola Angola ## 4 AI AIA Anguilla Anguilla Anguilla ## 5 AX ALA Aland Islands Finland:Aland Islands Finland ## 6 AL ALB Albania Albania Albania We rename the variable a3 by iso-a3: dat <- rename(dat, "iso-a3" a3) head(dat) ## a2 iso-a3 ISOname mapname sovereignty ## 1 AW ABW Aruba Aruba Netherlands ## 2 AF AFG Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan ## 3 AO AGO Angola Angola Angola ## 4 AI AIA Anguilla Anguilla Anguilla ## 5 AX ALA Aland Islands Finland:Aland Islands Finland ## 6 AL ALB Albania Albania Albania We save the visited countries in a vector called countries_visited. To know the ISO codes of the countries you have visited, check the column ISOname in the dataset and extract the ISO codes from the column iso-a3: countries_visited <- c("AUS", "BEL", "CAN", "CZE", "DNK", "FIN", "FRA", "DEU", "GRC", "HUN", "IRL", "ITA", "LVA", "LUX", "MCO", "MMR", "NLD", "NZL", "NOR", "PRT", "ROU", "SGP", "ESP", "SWE", "CHE", "TWN", "THA", "GBR", "USA") We now create a new variable called visited which equals to 1 if you have visited the country and 0 otherwise: dat$visited <- ifelse(dat$`iso-a3` %in% countries_visited, 1, 0) head(dat) ## a2 iso-a3 ISOname mapname sovereignty visited ## 1 AW ABW Aruba Aruba Netherlands 0 ## 2 AF AFG Afghanistan Afghanistan Afghanistan 0 ## 3 AO AGO Angola Angola Angola 0 ## 4 AI AIA Anguilla Anguilla Anguilla 0 ## 5 AX ALA Aland Islands Finland:Aland Islands Finland 0 ## 6 AL ALB Albania Albania Albania 0 Finally, we are ready to draw the world map thanks to the hcmap() command from the {highcharter} package: hcmap( map "custom/world-highres3", # high resolution world map data dat, # name of dataset joinBy "iso-a3", value "visited", showInLegend FALSE, # hide legend nullColor "#DADADA", download_map_data TRUE ) %>% hc_mapNavigation(enabled FALSE) %>% hc_legend("none") %>% hc_title(text "World map") # title Change the arguments to your needs and you are good to go. To go even further, you can also add a list including all your visited countries thanks to this code: dat <- subset(dat, dat$visited 1) sort(dat$ISOname) # sort is to have the visited countries in alphabetical order ## "Australia" ## "Belgium" ## "Canada" ## "Clipperton Island" ## "Czech Republic" ## "Denmark" ## "Finland" ## "France" ## "Germany" ## "Greece" ## "Hungary" ## "Ireland" ## "Italy" ## "Latvia" ## "Luxembourg" ## "Monaco" ## "Myanmar" ## "Netherlands" ## "New Zealand" ## "Norway" ## "Portugal" ## "Portugal" ## "Portugal" ## "Romania" ## "Singapore" ## "Spain" ## "Spain" ## "Sweden" ## "Switzerland" ## "Taiwan" ## "Thailand" ## "United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland" ## "United States" And count the number of countries visited: paste( "Total: ", sum(dat$visited), " countries." ) ## "Total: 33 countries." In conclusion, here is the entire code to draw a world map with visited countries highlighted, a list of all countries in alphabetical order and the number of countries visited: library(highcharter) library(dplyr) library(maps) dat <- iso3166 dat <- rename(dat, "iso-a3" a3) countries_visited <- c("AUS", "BEL", "CAN", "CZE", "DNK", "FIN", "FRA", "DEU", "GRC", "HUN", "IRL", "ITA", "LVA", "LUX", "MCO", "MMR", "NLD", "NZL", "NOR", "PRT", "ROU", "SGP", "ESP", "SWE", "CHE", "TWN", "THA", "GBR", "USA") dat$visited % hc_mapNavigation(enabled FALSE) %>% hc_legend("none") %>% hc_title(text "World map") # title dat <- subset(dat, dat$visited 1) sort(dat$ISOname) # sort is to have the visited countries in alphabetical order paste( "Total: ", sum(dat$visited), " countries." ) Thanks for reading. I hope this article helped you to draw a world map with visited countries highlighted in R. As always, if you have a question or a suggestion related to the topic covered in this article, please add it as a comment so other readers can benefit from the discussion.