Truth and Cartography: Spatial Data Visualization

We’ve spent the last few weeks learning about operations to compile geographic information into databases for visualization and analysis. Because analysis requires you to know something about your data and because visualization is a great way to explore your data (especially when there’s a lot of it), we’ll turn to that next. For the next few weeks, we’ll be looking at different ways to visualize spatial data and the associated approaches in R. Note that this could be an entire course by itself, but hopefully you’ll get enough to get started making publication quality maps by the time we’re done

Resources

• The Introduction and Visualizing Geospatial Data chapters Principles of Figure Design section in (Wilke 2019) provide a useful set of general introductions to data visualization principles and practce that is “platform agnostic” (though much of Wilke’s work is done in R).

• The Look at Data and Draw Maps chapters in (Healy 2018) revisits many of the same ideas, but focuses specifically on R and ggplot2.

• This post on making maps people want to look at from ESRI is a nice, concise depiction of some core principles for planning a cartographic project.

Slides

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• Truth and Cartography
• Introduction to data visualization principles
• Extending those principles to maps
• Common geographic visualizations
• Looking ahead