Maps, Truth, and Cartography
Content for Monday, November 14, 2022
Now that we’ve talked a bit about data visualization principles and the grammar of graphics, it’s time to extend those ideas to maps. We’ll talk a bit about different kinds of maps, ways that maps can mislead (unintentionally or otherwise), and ways to make sure that your maps depict data the way you intend. We’ll also begin making some static maps to give you a sense for R’s capabilities.
Resources
The Draw Maps chapter by (Healy 2018) discusses a number of issues with the spatial depiction of data and has examples with graphics built with
ggplot2.All maps of parameter estimates are misleading by (Gelman and Price 1999) provides some useful cautionary notes about mapping the results of statistical analyses.
Making maps with
Rby (Lovelace et al. 2019) introduces thetmappackage for making nice maps with relatively minimal syntax.
Objectives
By the end of today you should be able to:
Describe the various elements that comprise a map
Articulate common pitfalls that lead to misleading maps
Describe and generate several common types of data maps
Slides
The slides for today’s lesson are available online as an HTML file. Use the buttons below to open the slides either as an interactive website or as a static PDF (for printing or storing for later). You can also click in the slides below and navigate through them with your left and right arrow keys.
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