Geography was not my favourite subject as a high-schooler: maybe having a teacher who smoked a pipe in the classroom had somethiing to do with that. In fact, I swiched to Ancient Greek as an option as soon as I could: it was that bad
However, for some time I have loved early maps and have this one (regrettably not the original) on my wall at home
Recently I have been captivated at how modern ones can be used for socio-economic analyses with leading publications such as the Economist and 538 regularly producing maps using open data in their articles. The opportunities within R have expanded rapidly over the past year or so and I’m expecting lots of exciting developments in this field
For my own reference - but others might find it helpful - I have put together a few links to sources I find useful
Simple features,sf package from Edzer Pebesma who also is a main contribitor to the r-spatial blog
Kyle Walker has done a lot of work to aid downloading shape files and US census/acs data via his tigris and tidycensus packages. He also has an informative blog
Bhaskar Karambelkar has contributed a lot to the RStudio leaflet and leaflet.extras packages and ran a very comprehensive tutorial with slides at userR!2017. Here is a video of the three hour tutorial
On line bookdown book Geocomputation with R under development by Robin Lovelace and Jakub Nowosad
Ari Lamstein (https://twitter.com/AriLamstein) author of the choroplethr package who also runs courses and a relevant Facebook Group
On the interactive front, Tim Appelhans is the lead on the mapview and co-author of mapedit along with the ubiquitous [Kent Russell](https://twitter.com/timelyportfolio}(https://twitter.com/timelyportfolio)
More parochially for me,bcmaps, with Andy Teucher the driving force, covers my own geographical area
tmap, plotly, ggmap and rmapzen are other packages which all bring something different to the table
Other R experts who provide mapping articles in their blogs include Bob Rudis and Zev Ross
I have at some stage, corresponded or met most of the above and, as is practically a given in the R community, they are very helpful and willing to partake of their expertise. But where are the women?!
I anticipate adding to this list in the future so check back whenever you are need a reference and please provide additional suggestions