Maps with geo-spatial coordinates in R

I’ve been thinking a lot about the recent Australian federal election … and to visualise the data i’ve needed to plot the vote outcomes by booth.

As is so often the case, this is pretty easing using R.

The fantastic data.table package looks after joining the polling place IDs to the longitude and latitude coordinates, and the leaflet package creates great maps.

Here’s an example

Australian Federal Election 2019: New South Wales

NSW Polling booths (the intensity of the red simply reflects the number of polling places)

	# how to draw a map — and some geospatial points — using R
	require(data.table)
	require(leaflet)
	# get the data
	pollingPlaces <- as.data.table(read.csv("https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/Downloads/GeneralPollingPlacesDownload-24310.csv", skip = 1))
	nswReps <- as.data.table(read.csv("https://tallyroom.aec.gov.au/Downloads/HouseStateFirstPrefsByPollingPlaceDownload-24310-NSW.csv", skip = 1))
	# inner join to add lat and longtitude data
	nswReps[pollingPlaces[, list(PollingPlaceID, Latitude, Longitude)],
	`:=` (lat = i.Latitude, long = i.Longitude),
	on = 'PollingPlaceID']
	# part 1: out first map
	# create a simple map — show all pollling places in NSW
	nswVotingPlaces <- leaflet(nswReps) %>%
	addTiles() %>%
	addCircleMarkers(lat = ~lat, lng = ~long, popup = ~DivisionNm,
	col = 'red', stroke = FALSE, fillOpacity = 0.01)
	print(nswVotingPlaces)

view raw fed2019_nsw_boothmap.r hosted with ❤ by GitHub