Like most R Programmers, I’m a fan of the R packages that RStudio develops. They recently announced Flexdashboards: Easy interactive dashboards written in RMarkdown. I’m always trying to expand my R skills with side projects so I’ve put together a Flexdashboard to visualize USA zipcodes on a choropleth map and a shiny dropdown to dynamically switch States. A choropleth map is a shaded map to show numerical variations such as population density.

These are the general steps of the project:

1. Locate and download shapefiles from www2.census.gov
2. Locate and download zipcode data which contain corresponding zipcodes, city, county and demographic information about estimated population
3. Clean and format the zipcode data and merge with the shapefile data object
4. Create a choropleth map with the htmlwidget: leaflet

Here it is: https://jasminedumas.shinyapps.io/Choropleth_Zipcodes/

Let me know what you think!