Using Area Map to Visualize Geographical Data in Exploratory
Visualizing geographical data using Map gives you a better and more intuitive understanding of the data rather than having the data on a table or bar chart. In Exploratory, you can install from a set of the prepared maps to visualize your geographical data or can add your own GeoJSON files. Today, I’m going to walk you through how to install and use one of the prepared maps step by step.
Import Data
First, you need data :) Here, I have prepared the US States population data by scraping it from this Wikipedia page called List of U.S. states and territories by population.
You can download the data from this page. Select “Download CSV” to download the data.
In case you are interested in how to scrape and clean up the data, check the following post, which walks you through step by step.
Anyway, once you download the CSV data, clikc the ‘+’ icon next to the “Data Frames” and select “File Data”.
It will open up the File Data Source dialog. Choose “Text File (CSV, delimited).
Select the CSV file you downloaded above. You will see the preview data, click the “Save” button to import.
You will see the summary of the data after you import the data.
If you click “Table” tab, you can see the actual data. This data contains 3 columns, “state”, “pop”, and “state_code”.
Install Area Map from Map Extension Store
Exploratory Desktop installation includes a few pre-seeded Area Maps. US States Area is one of them. If you can’t find what you want, you might be able to find it from Exploratory’s Map Extension store. Here’s how you can install additional maps from the store.
Go to Viz view, and select ‘Map — Area” chart type, then click the “Setup” link.
This will open the Extension dialog.
Click ‘Add New’ menu at the left hand side. It will show a list of the maps that are hosted at the store. Once you find what you want you can click on the ‘Install’ button.
Visualize Data with Area Map
This time, we have US States data, so we want to select ‘US States’ from Area Type dropdown.
1. Select an Appropriate Key Property
The ‘Key Property’ shows a list of the properties that you can use to match with your data.
Since this data includes both State names and State codes we can go with either NAME or STATEFP for the Key Property. I’ll go with the default, which is the NAME.
2. Select columns for Key Column and Color By
Select “state” column for Key Column to bind the data, and select “pop” column for “Color By”.
3. Configure Color Palette
Optionally, you can configure the color palette.
Try it for yourself!
If you don’t have Exploratory Desktop yet, you can sign up from here for 30 days free trial!
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