How To Make Geographic Map Visualizations In R
Written by Matt Dancho

This article is part of a R-Tips Weekly, a weekly video tutorial that shows you step-by-step how to do common R coding tasks.
If you are explaining data related to geography or just want to visualize by latitude / longitude location, you need to know ggplot2
& the tidyverse
for making maps.
This tutorial will show you how to make a publication-quality visualization! Here are the links to get set up. 👇
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Video Tutorial
Learn how to make geospatial maps using the ggplot2
package in my 10-minute YouTube video tutorial.
Working with Map Data
The first thing we need when creating a map is data that represents the latitude and longitude. We need to use a function called map_data()
to collect the data in the right structure for a ggplot2
map.
Map Data
Using the map_data()
function to collect lat/long data for the entire World.

Plotting the Map Data with ggplot2
We can use the geom_map()
& coord_map()
functions to plot the world.


Visualizing Republican Voting
So what can we do with Map Data + ggplot2
? How about visualizing how the US voted in 1976?!


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