braz: Following recent Infomaps with R trend - Visualizing Irish unemployment rates with a choropleth map

Thursday, November 19, 2009

Following recent Infomaps with R trend - Visualizing Irish unemployment rates with a choropleth map

Following on the recent trend of InfoMaps from Flowing Data and a call to R users to attempt their own examples. I saw this lovely German visualization with R and decided it was time to do Ireland.

Looking at these images, I'm reminded of the lyrics of the song "What a Difference A Day Made", the one that goes like

What a difference a day made,
Twenty-four little hours,
Brought the sun and the flowers,
Where there used to be rain...

Labels: choropleth unemployment map, infomap, Ireland, R, unemployment visualization

4 Comments:

Hi Eoin,
great work!
One thing: could you post the code? As you pointed out on my ryouready blog, you used a different data format, NUTS2/3 districts. I would like to see, how to handle these. :)
Cheers, Mark

By Mark Heckmann, at 10:14 a.m.
Hi Mark,

I also used a different set of maps as I needed to align to the published numbers and NUTS regions (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics).

The maps are available at: http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/gisco/popups/references/Administrative%20units%20and%20Statistical%20units1 or via http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/portal/page/portal/gisco/geodata/reference

The R code used rgdal but you can also use sp I think as I did later.

library(rgdal)
RG <- readOGR(".", "NUTS_RG_60M_2006")
names(RG)
IE <- grep("^IE", RG$NUTS_ID)
RG_IE <- RG[IE,]
plot(RG_IE, axes=TRUE)
colorsIE = rainbow(8)
plot(RG_IE[5:12,], col=colorsIE,axes=TRUE)

This line worked best once I discover there were some additional layers that I did not need to render to the graphic.

RG2_IE <- RG_IE[5:12,]
spplot(RG2_IE, "col_no",col=grey(.9), col.regions=myPalette, main="Unemployment in Ireland by Region - October 2008")

The Eurostat maps I used are dated from 2006 so you'll still have some issues to translate the changed state boundaries that one commenter on your blog made but otherwise I think this code should equally run for Deutschland with changing the IE to DE as the description file from Eurostat has "1267 DED23 DE Hoyerswerda, Kreisfreie Stadt Hoyerswerda, Kreisfreie Stadt Hoyerswerda, Kreisfreie Stadt Hoyerswerda, Kreisfreie Stadt" as the first Deutschland entry.

By Eoin Brazil, at 11:05 a.m.
Great, Thanks!!
Mark

By Anonymous, at 8:44 p.m.
Hello Eoin,

nice map.

can you get in touch when you get a chance?

Joe W

By Joe Wheatley, at 1:31 p.m.