Recent updates to my mapping packages now make it easy to combine choropleth maps and reference maps in R. All you have to do is pass the parameter reference_map = TRUE to the existing functions. This should “just work”, regardless of which region you zoom in on or what data ...

A user recently asked me how to add a state outline to a Zip Code map. Consider this map, which shows the percent white of each Zip Code Tabulated Area (ZCTA) in New York and New Jersey: Clearly the ZCTAs in northern New York have the highest concentration of white ...

Today I am happy to announce a new lesson for my free email course Learn to Map Census Data in R. This lesson explains how to get and map historic census data in R. While I had intended this lesson to only go to new signups, it looks like my ...

Today I am giving away 10 sessions of free, online, one-on-one R help. My hope is to get a better understanding of how my readers use R, and the issues they face when working on their own projects. The sessions will be over the next two weeks, online and 30-60 minutes ...

Today I am happy to announce that a new version of choroplethr, v3.2.0, is now available. You can get it by typing the following from an R console: install.packages("choroplethr") Note that it sometimes takes a few days for new packages to get copied to each CRAN mirror. If ...

Today I will demonstrate how to remove state abbreviations from a choroplethr map. I will also demonstrate how to combine multiple maps into a single image. This is what the final image looks like: In this case the abbreviations obscure information for the northeast part of the country, so it’...

Today I will demonstrate how to map historic US Presidential Election results in R. If you want to skip ahead and play with a shiny app that lets you visualize this dataset, then click here. The dataset we will use comes from wikipedia’s List of United States presidential election ...

On July 28 I had the pleasure of leading a tutorial titled Make a Census Explorer with Shiny! at the San Francisco R-ladies Meetup. A big thank you to Gabriela de Queiroz for organizing the event, Sharethrough for hosting it, and all the participants for attending. If you are interested in ...

Today I will demonstrate how to create maps of “other countries”, and use map projections, with the choroplethr package in R. I write “other countries” in quotes because, like most things, translating a high level wish into software can be complicated. If you want to skip ahead and play with ...

Today I am happy to announce a new tutorial I am running titled Make a Census Explorer with Shiny! It is free and will be held July 28 in San Francisco. In the tutorial we will combine R’s Shiny framework for web development with the census-mapping choroplethr package to create ...

One interesting feature of Census data is that it can help us to better understand current events and claims by the media. For example, the news coverage of the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri often reported that Ferguson is predominately black, while the police officers are predominately white. ...

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Today I am happy to announce a new web app I have created for exploring Census Tract Demographics in California. You can view the running app here. The source code is available here. I view the app as a companion to my new package choroplethrCaCensusTract, which is designed to make ...

Today I am happy to announce that my newest R package, choroplethrCaCensusTract, is now available on github. The package’s title is a combination of three words: choroplethr: the package has similar functions and data objects as my package choroplethr. The name choroplethr itself is a combination of the words ...

Today I am happy to announce that I have migrated my blog from JustAnRBlog.wordpress.com to AriLamstein.com. I thought I would give an inside peek into the change in case others have an interest. Also, I would personally like to see more R packages and blogs, and I ...

Today I am happy to announce that choroplethr v3.1.0 is now on CRAN. You can get it by typing the following from an R console: install.packages("choroplethr") This version adds better support for summary demographic data for each state and county in the US. The data is in two ...

Introduction choroplethr v3.0 is now available on github. You can get it by typing # install.packages("devtools") library(devtools) install_github('arilamstein/[email protected]') Version 1.3.0 has two new features: Data frame df_zip_demographics contains eight demographic statistics about each ZIP Code Tabulated Area (ZCTA) in the US. Data ...