Introduction
So, I’m not really a geographer. But any good analyst worth their salt will eventually have to do some kind of mapping or spatial visualization. Mapping is not really a forte of mine, though I have played around with it some in the past.
I was working with some shapefile data a while ago and thought about how its funny that so much of spatial data is dominated by a format that is basically proprietary. I looked around for some good tutorials on using shapefile data in R, and even so it took me a while to figure it out, longer than I would have thought.
So I thought I’d put together a simple example of making nice choropleths using R and ggmap. Let’s do it using some nice shapefile data of my favourite city in the world courtesy of the good folks at Toronto’s Open Data initiative.
Background
We’ll need a few spatial plotting packages in R (ggmap, rgeos, maptools).
Also the shapefile originally threw some kind of weird error when I originally tried to load it into R, but it was nothing loading it into QGIS once and resaving it wouldn’t fix. The working version is available on the github page for this post.
Analysis
First let’s just load in the shapefile and plot the raw boundary data using maptools. What do we get?
shpfile "NEIGHBORHOODS_WGS84_2.shp"
sh readShapePoly(shpfile)
plot(sh)
This just yields the raw polygons themselves. Any good Torontonian would recognize these shapes. There’s some maps like these with words squished into the polygons hanging in lots of print shops on Queen Street. Also as someone pointed out to me, most T-dotters think of the grid of downtown streets as running directly North-South and East-West but it actually sits on an angle.
Okay, that’s a good start. Now we’re going to include the …read more
Source:: r-bloggers.com
