Geocomputation with R – the beginnings

Just over one year ago, I met Robin in Poznan, Poland, who was teaching as part of the GEOCENTRUM project at the Adam Mickiewicz University. To our surprise, we found that we shared an idea of writing a book explaining how to use R for spatial data analysis.

The timing worked well. Over the next few months, Robin finished Phase II of his project (the Propensity to Cycle Tool (PCT)) and I completed my PhD and moved to Cincinnati to work in Space Informatics Lab. At the same time, many things developed in R’s spatial ecosystem, most notably the development of the sf package dealing with vector data in R.

At the beginning of this year, we wrote a book proposal which led to a contract with CRC Press to write Geocomputation with R. As of today, we are working on the first five chapters.

• Introduction – an introduction to this book, our motivation, overview of R’s spatial ecosystem, and R’s spatial history
• Geographic data in R – basis of spatial data representation in R, including vector data, raster data, and coordinate reference systems
• Attribute data operations – non-spatial operations on spatial data
• Spatial data operations – spatial counterparts of the operation in the previous chapter
• Geographic data I/O – ways to read and write spatial data in R

The hard copy of the book will be published in late 2018.

We decided early on to develop this book in the open to remove financial barriers to learning open source software. It also enables community contributions, which we encourage on any part of the book, for example:

• Improvements to the text, e.g. clarifying unclear sentences, fixing typos
• Changes to the code, e.g. to do things in a more efficient way
• Suggestions on content in the issue tracker

An up-to-date version of the book can be found at http://robinlovelace.net/geocompr/ which can be edited from our github repo or by clicking on the ‘edit’ pencil-shaped symbol at the top left of any part of the book: