Adding geographical information
The main purpose of this chapter is to look at the geographical distribution of wages across the US. Mapping this out requires us to first have a map. Fortunately, maps of the US, both at the state and county-levels, are available in the maps package, and the data required to make the maps can be extracted. We will align our employment data with the map data in this recipe so that the correct data is represented at the right location on the map.
Getting ready
We already have the area dataset imported into R, so we are ready to go.
How to do it...
The following steps will guide you through the process of creating your first map in R:
- Let's first look at the data in
area:
head (area)
The output is shown in the following screenshot:
We see that there is something called area_fips here. Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) codes are used by the Census Bureau to designate counties and other geographical areas in the US.
- We want to capitalize all the names...
