Space

Content for Monday, July 14, 2025–Friday, July 18, 2025

Readings

Required readings

Foundational principles:

• Chapter 10 in The Truthful Art (Cairo 2016)
• Chapter 7 in Data Visualization (Healy 2018)

Geographic principles:

• Why all world maps are wrong
• “When Maps Lie”
• The True Size Of…
• Projection comparison
• Map projections (try comparing Robinson with Mercator to see how badly Mercator exaggerates the northern hemisphere)

Readings you should glance through as examples

Projections:

• “These Twisted Maps Prove That America Isn’t a Red Country”
• “New World Map That Accurately Shows Earth in 2D Created by Scientists”

{sf} in action:

• Andrew Heiss, “How to make fancy road trip maps with R and OpenStreetMap”
• Andrew Heiss, “Road trip analysis! How to use and play with Google Location History in R”
• Andrew Heiss, “Making Middle Earth maps with R”
• Andrew Heiss, “Calculating the proportion of US state borders that are coastlines”

More {sf} fun times:

• If you want to understand how the magic geometry column actually works, check out this fantastic post.
• Check out this post where someone used {ggplot2} and {sf} to create fancy city map-based art that she printed for a friend. You can do similar things after this session!
• In addition to the example for this session, you can check out this tutorial on using the {sf} package to create maps. It shows how to include fancy map stuff like a north arrow and scale bar.

Slides

The slides for this week’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.

View all slides in new window Download PDF of all slides

Tip

Fun fact: If you type ? (or shift + /) while going through the slides, you can see a list of special slide-specific commands.

Videos

Videos for each section of the lecture are available at this YouTube playlist.

• Introduction
• Maps and truth
• Putting data on maps
• GIS in R with sf

You can also watch the playlist (and skip around to different sections) here:

References

Cairo, Alberto. 2016. The Truthful Art: Data, Charts, and Maps for Communication. Berkeley, California: New Riders.

Healy, Kieran. 2018. Data Visualization: A Practical Introduction. Princeton: Princeton University Press. http://socviz.co/.