[R-sig-Geo] Very basic figure question

[Barry Rowlingson]

On Thu, Oct 15, 2009 at 11:28 AM, Rob Forsyth
<r.j.forsyth at newcastle.ac.uk> wrote:
> A complete geo-tyro demonstrating ignorance here: please be tolerant!
>
> I have a large dataset comprising the results of a questionnaire from UK
> respondents. I am interested in geographic variation in responses and have
> built mixed-effect models incorporating County/Unitary Authority/Local
> Authority (a level of local government in the UK) as a factor-level random
> effect in lme4. Extracting the intercept of the random effects I can
> generate a normalised 0-1 score for each local authority. I would like to
> illustrate the results of this analysis and generate a map showing LAs
> coloured using this normalised score to set gray scale.
>
> We have campus access to ArcGIS and related programmes but I have no
> knowledge of these whatsoever and wondered if for this limited task I could
> work within R? Are there any suitable public domain map objects and how
> would I go about this?

You certainly can draw coloured maps in R using the sp package and
various other things to help you get the data, such as the rgdal
package for reading shapefiles. However, getting the boundary data is
another problem...

 UK boundary data in the public domain? Ooh, I nearly laughed myself
off my chair! Are you american? No, UK border data is copyright,
controlled, restricted and if you want it you probably end up with an
MI5 file. Academics can get access to various boundary data sets via
ukborders. but we academics already have MI5 files as dangerous
intellectual subversives anyway:

http://edina.ac.uk/ukborders/

Barry