Using R — Working with Geospatial Data

Posted on April 14, 2013 by Steven Brey
This entry is part 6 of 12 in the series Using R

GIS, an acronym that brings joy to some and strikes fear in the heart of those not interested in buying expensive software. Luckily fight or flight can be saved for another day because you don’t need to be a GIS jock with a wad of cash to work with spatial data and make beautiful plots. A computer and internet connection should be all you need. In this post I will show how to

  • Get a machine ready to use R to work with geospatial data
  • Describe what type of data can be used and some of the exciting sources of free GIS data
  • Use data from the Washington Department of Natural Resources to generate some pretty plots by working through an example script   read more …
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Best Best Practices Ever!

Posted on February 13, 2013 by Jonathan Callahan

Every once in a while I read something that is so insightful, so clearly written and so well documented that it enters my own personal pantheon of “Best Ever” documents. I recently added a new, simply divine article titled Best Practices for Scientific Computing and hope that everyone reading this post also takes the time to read that article. I’m including the outline here only to encourage you to read the article in it’s entirety.  It is extremely well written.   read more …

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Using R — Package Installation Problems

Posted on February 12, 2013 by Jonathan Callahan
This entry is part 3 of 12 in the series Using R

The post titled Installing Packages described the basics of package installation with R.  The process is wonderfully simple when everything goes well.  But it can be maddening when it does not.  Error messages give a hint as to what went wrong but do not necessarily tell you how to resolve the problem.  This post will collect some of the error messages we’ve encountered while installing R packages and describe the reasons for the error and the workarounds we’ve found.   read more …

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Using R — Packaging a C library in 15 minutes

Posted on November 17, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan
This entry is part 14 of 12 in the series Using R

Yes, this post condenses 50+ hours of learning into a 15 minute tutorial.  Read ‘em and weep.  (That is, you read while I weep.)   read more …

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Using R — Callling C code with Rcpp

Posted on November 12, 2012 by Jonathan Callahan
This entry is part 12 of 12 in the series Using R

In two previous posts we described how R can call C code with .C() and the more complex yet more robust option of calling C code with .Call().  Here we will describe how the Rcpp package can be used to greatly simplify your C code without forcing you to become expert in C++.   read more …

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