Even Easier-to-Use R Package for School District Shapefiles

leaidr Update

A few months ago, I created {leaidr} for easier download of U.S. school district shapefiles. Daniel Anderson went through and greatly improved the package, making it even easier to download and use the shapefiles (thanks Dan!).

Now, instead of having to run lea_prep(), you can download the shapefiles from Dan’s Github repository like so:

library(leaidr)
tn <- lea_get("tn")
## OGR data source with driver: ESRI Shapefile
## Source: "/private/var/folders/pj/nmg9b8_93dq4kwt8nt2d4cj40000gn/T/RtmpCFlfFo/47", layer: "47"
## with 158 features
## It has 18 fields
tn %>%
sf::st_as_sf() %>%
ggplot2::ggplot() +
ggplot2::geom_sf()

And, if you use lea_get() (i.e., with state = NULL), you’ll get the shapefiles for the whole U.S. back via ROpenSci’s {piggyback}.

So much easier and better!

Because Dan helped make the package so great, I wanted to add on and showcase what can be done with it! So, today’s post is jam-packed with choices…

• Create a Beautiful Map in Mapbox
• Create a Shiny App with Your Beautiful Maps
• Add A Shiny App to the Package

Create a Beautiful Map in Mapbox

Asmae Toumi wrote a blog post on how to make maps using R and Mapbox. So, I figured: why not announce the new and improved {leaidr} functions to create a beautiful Mapbox map??

This walkthrough will go a little deeper with Mapbox, as I am an extreme beginner and had to do a lot of investigating to figure out how to use it.

I suggest first reading through Asmae’s tutorial as there are a few things you need to do before being able to run the below: download the {mapboxapi} package, create a Mapbox account, and install Tippecanoe.

library(tidyverse)
# remotes::install_github("walkerke/mapboxapi")
library(mapboxapi)
# if you haven't installed the package yet
# devtools::install_github("ivelasq/leaidr")
library(leaidr)
library(rmapshaper)
library(mapdeck)

shp <- # leaidr shapefiles
lea_get(c("or", "wa")) %>%
sf::st_as_sf()
dat <- # data to append
read_csv("/Users/shortessay/Downloads/ccd_lea_141_1819_l_1a_091019/ccd_lea_141_1819_l_1a_091019.csv") %>%
filter(ST %in% c("OR", "WA"))
northwest <-
shp %>%
select(GEOID, geometry) %>%
sp::merge(dat, by.x = "GEOID", by.y = "LEAID")

tippecanoe(
input = northwest,
output = "nw.mbtiles",
layer_name = "northwest")
upload_tiles(input = "nw.mbtiles",
username = "ivelasq3",
tileset_id = "northwest",
multipart = TRUE)

mapdeck(token = Sys.getenv("MAPBOX_PUBLIC_TOKEN"),
style = "mapbox://styles/ivelasq3/ckehhzzld3l3p19mht1n8hksj",
zoom = 4,
location = c(-120.161, 45.843))

Create a Shiny App with Your Beautiful Map

Once you have the mapdeck() function all set up, you can use it in a Shiny app. Here’s some reference code that I found useful for using renderMapdeck(). Thank you Greg Huang!

This is an example of a very bare bones Shiny app. For the UI, use mapdeckOutput():

library(tidyverse)
library(shiny)
library(mapdeck)
ui <- fluidPage(
mapdeckOutput(outputId = "createMap")
)

And for the server, paste the mapdeck() function in renderMapdeck():

server <- function(input, output) {
output$createMap <- renderMapdeck({
mapdeck(token = Sys.getenv("MAPBOX_PUBLIC_TOKEN"),
style = "mapbox://styles/ivelasq3/ckehhzzld3l3p19mht1n8hksj",
zoom = 4,
location = c(-120.161, 45.843))
})
}

I uploaded the bare bones app here.

Add A Shiny App to the Package

Now, say you would like to add the Shiny app to your package as well as upload to shinyapps.io / instead of uploading to shinyapps.io. Thankfully, Dean Attali has a great walkthrough on how to do this!

1. Add {shiny} to your dependencies in your DESCRIPTION file (I do this with usethis::use_package("shiny")).
2. Create a folder called inst in your package with another folder for the Shiny example, and your UI/server file(s) within.
3. Create an R file to run your example (I used usethis::use_r("runExample.R")) to create this file.
4. Don’t forget to document! devtools::document()

So, if you were to install and load {leaidr}, you can run leaidr::runExample() to launch the Shiny app. To see what the files look like, check out the Github repo files here.

Conclusion

In conclusion, {leaidr} can help you map your data as long as you have school district LEAID’s or names in there somewhere. I hope that it helps you in your education data projects!