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Quickly create a choropleth sketch

Source: R/quick_map.R
quick_map.Rd

This is a quick way to create a choropleth sketch of town-, neighborhood-, or tract-level data. Uses a corresponding sf object; as of June 2018, this sf object must be one that ships with this package, or otherwise be globally available.

Usage

quick_map(
  data,
  name = name,
  value = value,
  level = c("town", "neighborhood", "tract"),
  city = NULL,
  n = 5,
  palette = "GnBu",
  title = NULL,
  ...
)

Arguments

data

A data frame containing data by geography.

name

Bare column name of location names to join; defaults name.

value

Bare column name of numeric values to map; defaults value.

level

String giving the desired geographic level; must be one of "town", "neighborhood", or "tract". Defaults "town".

city

If geographic level is neighborhood, string of the corresponding city name to match to a spatial object.

n

Number of breaks into which to bin values; defaults (approximately) 5.

palette

String of a ColorBrewer palette; see RColorBrewer::RColorBrewer() for possible values. Defaults "GnBu".

title

String giving the title, if desired, for the plot.

...

Arguments passed on to ggplot2::geom_sf

xlim,ylim

Limits for the x and y axes. These limits are specified in the units of the default CRS. By default, this means projected coordinates (default_crs = NULL). How limit specifications translate into the exact region shown on the plot can be confusing when non-linear or rotated coordinate systems are used as the default crs. First, different methods can be preferable under different conditions. See parameter lims_method for details. Second, specifying limits along only one direction can affect the automatically generated limits along the other direction. Therefore, it is best to always specify limits for both x and y. Third, specifying limits via position scales or xlim()/ylim() is strongly discouraged, as it can result in data points being dropped from the plot even though they would be visible in the final plot region.

expand

If TRUE, the default, adds a small expansion factor to the limits to ensure that data and axes don't overlap. If FALSE, limits are taken exactly from the data or xlim/ylim. Giving a logical vector will separately control the expansion for the four directions (top, left, bottom and right). The expand argument will be recycled to length 4 if necessary. Alternatively, can be a named logical vector to control a single direction, e.g. expand = c(bottom = FALSE).

crs

The coordinate reference system (CRS) into which all data should be projected before plotting. If not specified, will use the CRS defined in the first sf layer of the plot.

default_crs

The default CRS to be used for non-sf layers (which don't carry any CRS information) and scale limits. The default value of NULL means that the setting for crs is used. This implies that all non-sf layers and scale limits are assumed to be specified in projected coordinates. A useful alternative setting is default_crs = sf::st_crs(4326), which means x and y positions are interpreted as longitude and latitude, respectively, in the World Geodetic System 1984 (WGS84).

datum

CRS that provides datum to use when generating graticules.

label_graticule

Character vector indicating which graticule lines should be labeled where. Meridians run north-south, and the letters "N" and "S" indicate that they should be labeled on their north or south end points, respectively. Parallels run east-west, and the letters "E" and "W" indicate that they should be labeled on their east or west end points, respectively. Thus, label_graticule = "SW" would label meridians at their south end and parallels at their west end, whereas label_graticule = "EW" would label parallels at both ends and meridians not at all. Because meridians and parallels can in general intersect with any side of the plot panel, for any choice of label_graticule labels are not guaranteed to reside on only one particular side of the plot panel. Also, label_graticule can cause labeling artifacts, in particular if a graticule line coincides with the edge of the plot panel. In such circumstances, label_axes will generally yield better results and should be used instead.

This parameter can be used alone or in combination with label_axes.

label_axes

Character vector or named list of character values specifying which graticule lines (meridians or parallels) should be labeled on which side of the plot. Meridians are indicated by "E" (for East) and parallels by "N" (for North). Default is "--EN", which specifies (clockwise from the top) no labels on the top, none on the right, meridians on the bottom, and parallels on the left. Alternatively, this setting could have been specified with list(bottom = "E", left = "N").

This parameter can be used alone or in combination with label_graticule.

lims_method

Method specifying how scale limits are converted into limits on the plot region. Has no effect when default_crs = NULL. For a very non-linear CRS (e.g., a perspective centered around the North pole), the available methods yield widely differing results, and you may want to try various options. Methods currently implemented include "cross" (the default), "box", "orthogonal", and "geometry_bbox". For method "cross", limits along one direction (e.g., longitude) are applied at the midpoint of the other direction (e.g., latitude). This method avoids excessively large limits for rotated coordinate systems but means that sometimes limits need to be expanded a little further if extreme data points are to be included in the final plot region. By contrast, for method "box", a box is generated out of the limits along both directions, and then limits in projected coordinates are chosen such that the entire box is visible. This method can yield plot regions that are too large. Finally, method "orthogonal" applies limits separately along each axis, and method "geometry_bbox" ignores all limit information except the bounding boxes of any objects in the geometry aesthetic.

ndiscr

Number of segments to use for discretising graticule lines; try increasing this number when graticules look incorrect.

default

Is this the default coordinate system? If FALSE (the default), then replacing this coordinate system with another one creates a message alerting the user that the coordinate system is being replaced. If TRUE, that warning is suppressed.

clip

Should drawing be clipped to the extent of the plot panel? A setting of "on" (the default) means yes, and a setting of "off" means no. In most cases, the default of "on" should not be changed, as setting clip = "off" can cause unexpected results. It allows drawing of data points anywhere on the plot, including in the plot margins. If limits are set via xlim and ylim and some data points fall outside those limits, then those data points may show up in places such as the axes, the legend, the plot title, or the plot margins.

reverse

A string giving which directions to reverse. "none" (default) keeps directions as is. "x" and "y" can be used to reverse their respective directions. "xy" can be used to reverse both directions.

mapping

Set of aesthetic mappings created by aes(). If specified and inherit.aes = TRUE (the default), it is combined with the default mapping at the top level of the plot. You must supply mapping if there is no plot mapping.

stat

The statistical transformation to use on the data for this layer. When using a geom_*() function to construct a layer, the stat argument can be used to override the default coupling between geoms and stats. The stat argument accepts the following:

  • A Stat ggproto subclass, for example StatCount.

  • A string naming the stat. To give the stat as a string, strip the function name of the stat_ prefix. For example, to use stat_count(), give the stat as "count".

  • For more information and other ways to specify the stat, see the layer stat documentation.

position

A position adjustment to use on the data for this layer. This can be used in various ways, including to prevent overplotting and improving the display. The position argument accepts the following:

  • The result of calling a position function, such as position_jitter(). This method allows for passing extra arguments to the position.

  • A string naming the position adjustment. To give the position as a string, strip the function name of the position_ prefix. For example, to use position_jitter(), give the position as "jitter".

  • For more information and other ways to specify the position, see the layer position documentation.

na.rm

If FALSE, the default, missing values are removed with a warning. If TRUE, missing values are silently removed.

show.legend

logical. Should this layer be included in the legends? NA, the default, includes if any aesthetics are mapped. FALSE never includes, and TRUE always includes.

You can also set this to one of "polygon", "line", and "point" to override the default legend.

inherit.aes

If FALSE, overrides the default aesthetics, rather than combining with them. This is most useful for helper functions that define both data and aesthetics and shouldn't inherit behaviour from the default plot specification, e.g. annotation_borders().

parse

If TRUE, the labels will be parsed into expressions and displayed as described in ?plotmath.

label.padding

Amount of padding around label. Defaults to 0.25 lines.

label.r

Radius of rounded corners. Defaults to 0.15 lines.

label.size

[Deprecated] Replaced by the linewidth aesthetic. Size of label border, in mm.

border.colour,border.color

Colour of label border. When NULL (default), the colour aesthetic determines the colour of the label border. border.color is an alias for border.colour.

text.colour,text.color

Colour of the text. When NULL (default), the colour aesthetic determines the colour of the text. text.color is an alias for text.colour.

fun.geometry

A function that takes a sfc object and returns a sfc_POINT with the same length as the input. If NULL, function(x) sf::st_point_on_surface(sf::st_zm(x)) will be used. Note that the function may warn about the incorrectness of the result if the data is not projected, but you can ignore this except when you really care about the exact locations.

check_overlap

If TRUE, text that overlaps previous text in the same layer will not be plotted. check_overlap happens at draw time and in the order of the data. Therefore data should be arranged by the label column before calling geom_text(). Note that this argument is not supported by geom_label().

geom

The geometric object to use to display the data for this layer. When using a stat_*() function to construct a layer, the geom argument can be used to override the default coupling between stats and geoms. The geom argument accepts the following:

  • A Geom ggproto subclass, for example GeomPoint.

  • A string naming the geom. To give the geom as a string, strip the function name of the geom_ prefix. For example, to use geom_point(), give the geom as "point".

  • For more information and other ways to specify the geom, see the layer geom documentation.

Value

A ggplot

See also

ggplot2::geom_sf()

Examples

if (FALSE) { # \dontrun{
tidycensus::get_acs(
    geography = "county subdivision", year = 2023,
    variables = c(median_age = "B01002_001"), state = "09", county = "170"
) |>
    town_names(NAME) |>
    dplyr::filter(NAME %in% regions$`Greater New Haven`) |>
    quick_map(name = NAME, value = estimate, title = "Median age by town, 2023", n = 6)
} # }