Visualizing spatial data

Spatial data refers to information about the physical location or shape of objects, and their relationships to each other. Examples of spatial data include latitude and longitude of a place; the boundary lines of a region; or a grid showing the elevation of an area.

• Chapter 11  Doctors across the world: making maps with ggplot2 will discuss extracting country boundary data using the maps package, and then plotting choropleth maps with ggplot2 to visualize the value of a variable for each country.

• Chapter 12  Time zones: spatial data and mapping with sf introduces you to the sf package for manipulating spatial data in R, and shows you how to plot geographic coordinate data. This chapter also covers co-ordinate systems.

• Chapter 13  US House elections: geography on a grid with geofacet describes creating multiple area charts, each for a different region, and then arranging them in a grid that represents the underlying geography using the geofacet package.

In this section, you’ll also learn how to create and arrange custom legends using patchwork, as well as repurposing elements of ggplot2 charts to create more aesthetically pleasing titles.

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