Computation Skills Workshop: Geospatial visualizations with R

Benjamin Soltoff

Geospatial visualizations with R

R contains many different packages for importing, structuring, and visualizing geospatial datasets. In this workshop we will consider two workflows for drawing geospatial data visualizations (aka data maps) using pre-generated mapping tiles as well as spatial vector datasets. These methods integrate directly into tidy workflows and visualization methods such as ggplot2.

Overview

R contains many different packages for importing, structuring, and visualizing geospatial datasets. In this workshop we will consider two workflows for drawing geospatial data visualizations (aka data maps). In the first method we will obtain pre-generated mapping tiles from sources such as Stamen Maps using the ggmap package. With the second method, we will use spatial data files which contain detailed information to draw all the components of a map (e.g. points, lines, polygons) using the simple features framework and the sf package. These methods integrate directly into tidy workflows and visualization methods such as ggplot2.

Objectives

Introduce the major components of a geospatial visualization
Identify how to obtain map tiles using ggmap and get_map()
Generate plots overlaying data on raster map tiles
Define common data structures for storing spatial data objects
Import spatial data using the sf package
Draw maps using ggplot2 and geom_sf()
Change coordinate systems

Audience

This workshop is designed for individuals with a basic familiarity using R and ggplot2 for data visualization.

Location

Room 295 in 1155 E 60th St.

Prework

Register for this workshop. Due to the current public health crisis, all participants must register in advance using this form.
Please sign up for a free RStudio Cloud account.
If you have not participated in a previous workshop meeting, join the workshop organization.

Links

Source materials for the workshop on GitHub

To download these materials to your local computer, use the code below:

usethis::use_course("css-skills/geospatial-viz")

Corrections

If you see mistakes or want to suggest changes, please create an issue on the source repository.

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY-NC 4.0. Source code is available at https://github.com/css-skills/site, unless otherwise noted. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Soltoff (2021, Oct. 19). Computation Skills Workshop: Geospatial visualizations with R. Retrieved from https://css-skills.uchicago.edu/posts/2021-10-19-geospatial-visualizations-with-r/

BibTeX citation

@misc{soltoff2021geospatial,
  author = {Soltoff, Benjamin},
  title = {Computation Skills Workshop: Geospatial visualizations with R},
  url = {https://css-skills.uchicago.edu/posts/2021-10-19-geospatial-visualizations-with-r/},
  year = {2021}
}