Believe it or not, there are two [1] [2] questions on @StackOverflowR about how to make QR codes in R. I personally think QR codes are kinda hokey, but who am I to argue with pressing needs of the #rstats community? I found libqrencode and it’s highly brew-able and apt-able (probably ...

In the never-ending battle for truth, justice and publishing more R packages than Oliver, I whipped out an R package for the OpenStreetMap Nominatim API. It actually hits the MapQuest Nominatim Servers for most of the calls, but the functionality is the same. The R package lets you: address_lookup: ...

Despite having shown various ways to overcome D3 cartographic envy, there are always more examples that can cause the green monster to rear it’s ugly head. Take the Voronoi Arc Map example. For those in need of a primer, a Voronoi tesslation/diagram is: …a partitioning of a plane ...

The $DAYJOB doesn’t afford much opportunity to work with cartographic datasets, but I really like maps and tinker with shapefiles and geo-data when I can, plus answer a ton of geo-questions on StackOverflow. R makes it easy—one might even say too easy—to work with maps. All it ...

Nathaniel Smith and Stéfan van der Walt presented [YouTube] a new colormap (for Python) at SciPy 2015 called viridis. From the authors: The default colourmap in Matplotlib is the colourful rainbow-map called Jet, which is deficient in many ways: small changes in the data sometimes produce large perceptual differences and ...

It’s not on CRAN yet, but there’s a devtools-installable R package for getting data from the OMDB API. It covers all of the public API endpoints: find_by_id: Retrieve OMDB info by IMDB ID search find_by_title: Retrieve OMDB info by title search get_actors: Get ...

Poynter did a nice interactive piece on world population by income (i.e. “How Many Live on How Much, and Where”). I’m always on the lookout for optimized shapefiles and clean data (I’m teaching a data science certificate program starting this Fall) and the speed of the site ...

@JennyBryan posted her slides from the 2015 R Summit and they are a must-read for instructors and even general stats/R-folk. She’s one of the foremost experts in R+GitHub and her personal and class workflows provide solid patterns worth emulation. One thing she has mentioned a few times—and ...

@briandconnelly (of pushoverr fame) made a super-cool post about connecting R to @IFTTT via IFTTT’s “Maker” channel. The IFTTT Maker interface to receive events is fairly straightforward and Brian’s code worked flawlessly, so it was easy to tweak a bit and wrap into a package. To get started, ...

I set aside a small bit of time to give rbokeh a try and figured I’d share a small bit of code that shows how to make the “same” chart in both ggplot2 and rbokeh. What is Bokeh/rbokeh? rbokeh is an htmlwidget wrapper for the Bokeh visualization library ...

School of Data had a recent post how to copy “every item” from a multi-page list. While their post did provide a neat hack, their “words of warning” are definitely missing some items and the overall methodology can be improved upon with some basic R scripting. First, the technique they ...

On the news, today, of the early stages of drought hitting the U.S. northeast states I decided to springboard off of yesterday’s post and show a more practical use of hexbin state maps than the built-in (and still purpose unknown to me) “bees” data. The U.S. Drought ...

There’s been lots of buzz about “statebin” maps of late. A recent tweet by @andrewxhill referencing work by @dannydb pointed to a nice shapefile that ends up being a really great way to handle statebin maps (and I feel like a fool for not considering it for a more ...

Over on The DO Loop, @RickWicklin does a nice job visualizing the causes of airline crashes in SAS using a mosaic plot. More often than not, I find mosaic plots can be a bit difficult to grok, but Rick’s use was spot on and I believe it shows the ...