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How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

andrewheiss.com

11–20 of 102 posts

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#11
post #6

Sometimes I hold events, and I want to put a little map on the flyer. It's a real pain to manually deal with some SVG of a larger map area, and clip it and style it to fit the space. Does anyone know of any solutions like this for this kind of problem?

A couple of years ago I rendered some maps in QGIS using OpenStreetMap data.

It was a complicated beast of functionality but if you learn the right 2 % of buttons it becomes a very competent tool for creating exactly the maps you need. It gives you the tools to show exactly the terrain features you care about (rivers, roads, streets, highways, trails, forests, buildings, railways, etc.) and you can choose to style them however you want.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#12
post #6

Sometimes I hold events, and I want to put a little map on the flyer. It's a real pain to manually deal with some SVG of a larger map area, and clip it and style it to fit the space. Does anyone know of any solutions like this for this kind of problem?

Could datawrapper be useful to you? It is easily configurable and the maps look great, I think.

https://www.datawrapper.de/maps

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#13
post #8

Vaguely related, a few years ago I made a map of "how to drive from SF to NYC while passing through the minimum number of Republican-voting counties": https://github.com/louispotok/blue-road-trip

that route follows an ancient coastline - https://starkeycomics.com/2021/06/11/how-a-coastline-100-mil...

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#15
post #6

Sometimes I hold events, and I want to put a little map on the flyer. It's a real pain to manually deal with some SVG of a larger map area, and clip it and style it to fit the space. Does anyone know of any solutions like this for this kind of problem?

Mapbox Studio should be able to do this

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#17
post #8

Vaguely related, a few years ago I made a map of "how to drive from SF to NYC while passing through the minimum number of Republican-voting counties": https://github.com/louispotok/blue-road-trip

Did you traverse this?

Maybe return through maximally republican counties and compare?

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#18

Why is there such a movement for making maps with R? The python ecosystem has more and better packages for making maps already. Notwithstanding that there are indeed some nice results, this new R toolchain movement towards maps feels like a waste of open source energy to me.

As someone proficient with R and Python, anything data viz-wise is substantially easier to do in R/ggplot2, particularly something complicated like this post. Most of the R packages in this post aren't that new either.

I agree with that. I've been programming on and off in Python since 2008 and really like the language. I started using R just over a year ago after joining a new team. It took a while to adjust but I've gotten to prefer it for exploratory data analysis and data viz.

Re: How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap

#19
post #8

Vaguely related, a few years ago I made a map of "how to drive from SF to NYC while passing through the minimum number of Republican-voting counties": https://github.com/louispotok/blue-road-trip

You rediscovered the black belt. Also where cotton is produced: https://qph.fs.quoracdn.net/main-qimg-5dcb98887fb22c1d3a920a...
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