Making maps on a computer has traditionally required the use of desktop geographic information system (GIS) software such as ArcGIS or QGIS. An alternative is to use R, a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. R has many features that allow it to read GIS data and produce both static and interactive maps. This document (which is an R Notebook) shows how to make maps with R and RStudio, using R base graphics and the maps and mapdata packages, in addition to the leaflet and tmap packages. We will also map U.S. Census data with help from the tigris and acs packages.
Click here to read the notebook.