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 (@hrbrmstr4), 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.