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(This article was first published on <strong><a href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2017/06/how-to-create-dot-density-maps-in-r.html"> Revolutions</a></strong>, and kindly contributed to <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.r-bloggers.com/">R-bloggers)</a> </div>
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<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.revolutionanalytics.com/2015/08/following-uo-on-the-news-with-choroplether-and-r.html" target="_blank">Choropleths</a> are a common approach to visualizing data on geographic maps. But choropleths — by design or necessity — aggregate individual data points into a single geographic region (like a country or census tract), which is all shaded a single colour. This can introduce interpretability issues (are we seeing changes in the variable of interest, or just population density?) and can fail to express the richness of the underlying data.</p>
<p>For an alternative approach, take a look at the recent Culture of Insight blog post which provides a tutorial on <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.cultureofinsight.com/2017/06/building-dot-density-maps-with-uk-census-data-in-r/" target="_blank">creating dot-density maps in R</a>. The chart below is based on UK Census data. Each point represents 10 London residents, with the colour representing one of five ethnic categories. Now, the UK census only reports ethnic ratios on a borough-by-borough basis, so the approach here is to simulate the individual resident data (which is not available) by randomly distributing points across the borough following the reported distribution. In a way, this is suggesting a level of precision which isn't available in the source data, but it does provide a visualization of London's ethnic diversity that isn't confounded with the underlying population distribution. </p>
<p><a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.cultureofinsight.com/2017/06/building-dot-density-maps-with-uk-census-data-in-r/" target="_blank"><img border="0" alt="London ethnicity" title="London ethnicity" src="http://revolution-computing.typepad.com/.a/6a010534b1db25970b01b7c9004a77970b-800wi"></a></p>
<p>Follow the link below to the detailed blog post, which includes R code (in both base and ggplot2 graphics) for creating density dot-charts like these. Also be sure to check out the zoomable version of the chart at the top of the page, which used Microsoft's <a rel="nofollow" href="https://www.microsoft.com/en-gb/download/details.aspx?id=24819" target="_blank">Deep Zoom Composer</a> in conjunction with <a rel="nofollow" href="http://openseadragon.github.io/" target="_blank">OpenSeadragon</a> to provide the zooming capability.</p>
<p>Culture of Insight: <a rel="nofollow" href="http://blog.cultureofinsight.com/2017/06/building-dot-density-maps-with-uk-census-data-in-r/" target="_blank">Building Dot Density Maps with UK Census Data in R</a></p>
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