It is, of course, John Snow who is credited with using maps to demonstrate that the clusters of deaths from cholera in London’s Soho during London’s 1854 outbreak were caused by contaminated water. This marked a major shift in thinking away from the disease being transmitted through dirty air: ... [Read more...]

Here is a quick example for how to get started with some of the more sophisticated point pattern analysis tools that have been developed for ecologists – principally the adehabitathr package – but that are very useful for human data. Ecologists deploy point pattern analysis to establish the “home range” of a ... [Read more...]

There has been a resurgence of interest in data visualizations inspired by Joy Division’s Unknown Pleasures album cover. These so-called “Joy Plots” are easier to create thanks to the development of the “ggjoy” R package and also some nice code posted using D3. I produced a global population map (... [Read more...]

It has been a long held dream of mine to create a spinning globe using nothing but R (I wish I was joking, but I’m not). Thanks to the brilliant mapmate package created by Matt Leonawicz and shed loads of computing power, today that dream became a reality. The ... [Read more...]

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Creating a giant dot density map using R. [Read more...]

I recently stumbled upon a great dataset. It’s the first to provide comprehensive data for world city sizes as far back as 3700BC. The authors (Meredith Reba, Femke Reitsma & Karen Seto) write: How were cities distributed globally in the past? How many people lived in these cities? How did ... [Read more...]

This tutorial was first published in “Geocomputation a Practical Primer“. Here is a more complex example showing how to produce a map of 18th Century Shipping flows. The data have been obtained from the CLIWOC project and they represent a sample of digitised ships’ logs from the 18th Century. We ... [Read more...]

Last year I published the above graphic, which then got […] [Read more...]

When I start an R class, one of my opening lines is nea […] [Read more...]

Robin Edwards, a researcher at UCL CASA, has created th […] [Read more...]

I am not a great fan of pie charts since they are often […] [Read more...]

For those starting out with spatial data in R, Robin Lo […] [Read more...]

R has become one of the world’s most widely used [...] [Read more...]

This tutorial has been kindly contributed by Robin Edwa [...] [Read more...]

This code has been kindly contributed by Robin Edwards [...] [Read more...]

Last week I ran an introductory workshop on the analysi [...] [Read more...]

Following the interest in our Twitter Tongues map for L [...] [Read more...]

The map above shows the routes flown by the top 7 airli [...] [Read more...]

I recently stumbled upon a fascinating dataset which co [...] [Read more...]