Making Maps with a Punchline

I’ve had a lifelong fascination with maps, and working with R definitely enables my map habit. Perhaps there’s something about being an immigrant that made me particularly introspective, since from a very early age I was aware that I was “from” one place on the map and now lived at this “other place.”

Some of my earliest family memories are of my father calling out a random city such as Reykjavik and my sister and I scrambling in response to be the first to find it on one of the many world atlases distributed throughout our house. They’re very fond memories, since playing Find the Wacky-Sounding City is a fantastic way to spend time with your kids.

One of my other favorite things to do is express my love of humor and my love of maps through ggplot. I love building facetious maps to amuse my Twitter followers, and recently discovered a lovely little data set containing states where it is illegal to have fireworks delivered.

So I wrote a little R function for the Fourth of July that put together a joke map and delivers a zinger: