Social Science Statistics Blog

To use this, first get the code via
source("http://people.fas.harvard.edu/~aeggers/googlemap.r")
which loads in a function named googlemap, to which you pass

• x: a vector of data


• codes: a vector of state/country codes (see the list of standard state and country codes),


• and location a region of the world ("africa", "asia", "europe", "middle_east", "south_america", "usa") or the whole world ("world")

For optional parameters to affect the scale of the figure and its colors, see the source.

Another quick example:

Suppose you wanted to make a little plot of Germany's colonial possessions in Africa. This code

googlemap(x = c(1,1,1,1), location = "africa", codes = c("CM", "TZ", "NA", "TG"),file = "germans_in_africa.png")

returns this url

"http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?cht=t&chtm=africa . . . etc.

and saves this PNG on your hard drive:

The scatterplot thing before was something of a novelty, but I think this mapping functionality could actually be useful for generating quick maps in R, since the existing approaches are pretty annoying in my (limited) experience. The Google Charts API is not very flexible about labels and whatnot, so you probably won't be publishing any of these figures. But I expect this will serve very well for quick exploratory stuff, and I hope others do too.

I'd love it if someone wanted to help roll this into a proper R package . . . .