30 Day Map Challenge
2019-12-10
1 Introduction
1.1 What Is This, Again?
Back in October of 2019, Twitter user Topi Tjukanov (@tjukanov
) posted1 a tweet launching a #30DayMapChallenge
for the month of November, 2019 and provided a list of 30 high-level topics, one for each day:
Points | Places |
Lines | Zones |
Polygons | Globe |
Hexagons | Urban |
Raster | Rural |
Blue | Environment |
Red | Built Environment |
Green | Population |
Yellow | Statistics |
Black and White | Climate |
Elevation | Hydrology |
Movement | Resources |
Tracks | Funny |
Boundaries | Experimental |
Names | Home |
Because the topics themselves were broad, I decided to introduce some constraints to help channel creativity and provide some focus to the overall project:
- The majority of the challenges had to be done in R.
- When using R, the
{sf}
and{raster}
packages should be considered first before using any other tools. - The topics should be either “cyber” (what I do for a living) or “Maine” (where I live), with a fallback to the U.S./world maps when appropriate or necessary. I also felt compelled to work all of these topics into any given post where feasible.
- Each map project had to be shared on social coding sites so others could offer critiques or benefit from what I did.
1.2 Who Are You, Again?
I’m just an independent R package author2 (~100 packages, some on CRAN) who happens to adore cartography. I work in cybersecurity (Chief Data Scientist at Rapid73), blather quite a bit on Twitter (@hrbrmstr
4), and occasional blogger5 (with a fairly good chance of blogging about mapping things).
If you’re interested in applying data science to cybersecurity problems, you may be interested in a book I co-authored back in 2014 — Data-Driven Security6.