Recreation of the NY Times ecommerce employment geo visualization

A New York Times article discusses how ecommerce is effecting retail employment over the period of 2012 to 2015. This repository attempts to recreate the geo visualization that has the job of communicating that the ecommerce jobs are mostly located in larger metropolitan areas. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2017/07/06/business/ecommerce-retail-jobs.html

• Currently there are R ggplot2 and python 3.6 matplotlib implementations.
• There are also some additional examples for using the npm mapshaper utility and QGIS.

1. Clone the git repository

git clone https://github.com/stoneyv/cbsa_plot.git

2. Download the data and shapefiles

If you are running linux or Mac OSX you can open a terminal and run this bash shell script to download the data and unzip it into the required directories. Windows users might use the newer Ubuntu linux subsytem on Windows 10 or cygwin.

cd cbsa_plot
chmod +x download-data-cbsa.sh
./download-data-cbsa.sh

3. Run the Python matplotlib or the R ggplot2 implementation.

R implementation

You need R and rstudio.
https://www.rstudio.com/products/rstudio/download/

The following CRAN packages are necessary

sp, stringr, data.table, dplyr, ggplot2, rgeos, rgdal, RColorBrewer

If you have difficulty installing a package look at the depends and imports fields of CRAN package page. To update a single package

install.packages("sp")

To update multiple packages at once

install.packages(c("sp","stringr","data.table","dplyr","ggplot2","rgeos","rgdal","RColorBrewer"))

Python matplotlib implementation

Install the Anaconda python 3.6 distribution
https://www.anaconda.com/download

Create a conda environment for geopandas
https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/tasks/manage-environments.html

# On the windows platform, omit the word "source"
conda create -n geopandas python=3.6 geopandas
source activate geopandas

Note that the following commands assume that you have activated the geopandas environment that you created above. You >should see "geopandas" at your command prompt once you activate the environment. To deactivate the environment you can >issue the source deactivate command.

Create a jupyter kernelspec for the geopandas environment
http://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/install/kernel_install.html#kernels-for-different-environments

python -m ipykernel install --user --name geopandas --display-name "Python (geopandas)"

Install any missing packages
https://conda.io/docs/user-guide/tasks/manage-pkgs.html#installing-packages

conda install <package_name>

Run the jupyter ipython notebook

jupyter notebook

When you want to change to the regular Anaconda environment you can issue

# On the Windows platform omit the word "source"
source deactivate geopandas