Introduction to Interactive Maps
Content for Monday, December 4, 2023
Now that you’ve had a chance to practice building a few maps and learning some of the core ideas behind the Grammar of Graphics, we can extend those ideas into the development of interactive webmaps and more expansive data visualizations that can be served on the internet and accessed by collaborators and members of the public. Like the previous unit on static maps, this could be a course unto itself, but we should be able to introduce you to enough ideas to get started.
Resources
The Web-mapping section from the University Consortium for Geographic Information Science’s GIS & Technology Body of Knowledge has a nice overview of the topic and it’s origins.
This post on User-Centered Design from Adobe provides a concise, general introduction to the core elements of User-Centered Design.
The Maps chapter in (Sievert 2020) gives a nice demonstration of using
plotlyto build interactive maps. More importantly, the book provides a comprehensive resource for building interactive web-based visualization in R.
Objectives
By the end of today you should be able to:
Define an API and their use in interactive visualization
Obtain a token for common mapping APIs
Build interactive maps using common packages
Recognize other opportunities for interactive visuals with
R