Developing good maps in R is about much more than just knowledge of mapping packages and strategies. It all starts with the data that may need to be cleaned, explored, manipulated, and analyzed as a part of the process of creating a meaningful plot or map.
Many of the questions we field during afrimapr community meetups and workshops are not directly related to making maps, but rather to package management, as well as data cleaning, manipulation, analysis, and plotting. Since afrimapr has a small core team we’ve been thinking about how to support our community with broader R and data challenges.
afrimapr is excited to announce that the R4DS Online Learning Community (R4DS) is now hosting a Slack channel (#chat-africa_maps) for our community where we can continue the conversation about mapping African data using R in the greater context of the R landscape. This means afrimapr community members can be embedded in a much bigger community of R learners and mentors with whom they can discuss aspects of their R code across all phases of their projects.
R4DS is a community of R learners at all skill levels working together to improve their skills. They offer a Slack workspace where community members can engage, ask questions, and have discussions about topics related to R and data science. Their #help channels are monitored by mentors and they make sure each question is answered. Members can get help with topics such as:
- data import
- data analysis and visualisation
- Shiny
- program testing
- modeling
- statistics
- and more!
There are also #chat channels where members can discuss spatial analysis, #Tidy-Tuesdays, Natural Language Processing, and more. Several #book-club channels offer the opportunities to join colleagues whilst working through books such as R for Data Science, Tidy Modeling with R, and Mastering Shiny.
We realise that Slack is a rather new platform for collaboration and learning to many of our members, therefore we’ve invited Jon Harmon, manager of the R4DS Slack workspace, to talk about the community and platform at our next afrimapr community meetup. Please join us on 22 September at 14:00 SAST to learn more and meet Jon.
You can join the R4DS workspace and access our #chat-africa_maps channel by following this link.
We look forward to seeing you at our next community meetup as well as the new #chat-africa_maps channel!
