Inhaling/Boozing Earth

2016-08-14

After seeing Nadieh Bremer’s great Breathing Earth infographic, I thought it would be cool to recreate it in R, as you do. Then I saw that it was made from lots of tif files…hmmm. I did some work with those before, ain’t doin it again voluntarily, no thanks.

So then I started thinking about something else that would be (kind of) similar and interesting. I saw the sf package and its interesting geom_sf() recently, and so I thought it would be a nice opportunity to try that out. Given we started with ‘breathing’ Earth, the natural next step was to think of ‘inhaling’ Earth! A quick download of some cannabis data from here1 and we’re (almost) ready to go, just some cleaning, tidying and merging with the geometry data from the rnaturalearth package. This takes some tidying, unfortunately.2

library(stringi)
library(sf)
library(rnaturalearth)
library(readr)
library(dplyr)
library(ggplot2)

weed <- read_csv("/Users/robert/Downloads/General Prevalence (27 Sep 2017 2207).csv", skip = 2) %>%
  filter(!is.na(Year)) %>%
  select(Region, Country, Rate = Best, Year) %>%
  mutate(Year = ifelse(Year == "2013-2014", "2014", ifelse(
    Year == "2014/15", "2014", ifelse(
      Year == "2013/14", "2014", ifelse(
        Year == "2012/13", "2012", Year)))),
    Year = paste0(Year, "-01-01"),
    Year = lubridate::parse_date_time(Year, "Ymd"),
    Country = stri_trans_general(Country, "Latin-ASCII"),
    Country = case_when(
      .$Country == "Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)" ~ "Venezuela",
      grepl("United Kingdom ", .$Country) ~ "United Kingdom",
      .$Country == "The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" ~ "Macedonia",
      .$Country == "Taiwan Province of China" ~ "Taiwan",
      .$Country == "Russian Federation" ~ "Russia",
      .$Country == "Lao People's Democratic Republic" ~ "Laos",
      grepl("China,", .$Country) ~ "China",
      .$Country == "Bolivia (Plurinational State of)" ~ "Bolivia",
      TRUE ~ .$Country),
    Period = ifelse(Year < "2006-01-01", "2000-2005", ifelse(
      Year > "2010-01-01", "2010-2015", "2006-2010")))

globe <- ne_countries(scale = 110, type = "countries", returnclass =  "sf") %>%
  select(Country = admin, formal = formal_en, geometry)

two <- full_join(weed, globe) %>% st_as_sf() %>%
  filter(!is.na(formal))

pp <- ggplot(two, aes(frame = Period)) + geom_sf(aes(fill = Rate)) +
  scale_fill_continuous(trans = "reverse", low = "#558833", high = "white") +
  theme_minimal()

animation::ani.options(ani.width = 800, ani.height = 600)
gganimate::gganimate(pp, interval = 3, "first.gif")

Hmm, not a good candidate for animations... Look at all that missing data.

How about booze? We can get some data from here, (filtered for 'All Types'), join the years available (three tables) and tidy it all up:

library(magrittr)
library(tidyr)
library(lubridate)

booze1 <- read_csv("/Users/robert/Downloads/Boozedata1.csv", skip = 1) %>%
  select(Country, `1961`:`1979`)
booze2 <- read_csv("/Users/robert/Downloads/Boozedata2.csv", skip = 1) %>%
  select(Country, `1980`:`1999`)
booze3 <- read_csv("/Users/robert/Downloads/Boozedata3.csv", skip = 1) %>%
  select(Country, `2000`:`2014`)
booze <- full_join(booze1, booze2) %>%
  full_join(booze3) %>%
  distinct(Country, .keep_all = TRUE) %>%
  gather(year, value, `1961`:`2014`) %>%
  mutate(Country = case_when(
      .$Country == "Venezuela (Bolivarian Republic of)" ~ "Venezuela",
      grepl("United Kingdom ", .$Country) ~ "United Kingdom",
      .$Country == "The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" ~ "Macedonia",
      .$Country == "Taiwan Province of China" ~ "Taiwan",
      .$Country == "Russian Federation" ~ "Russia",
      .$Country == "Democratic People's Republic of Korea" ~ "North Korea",
      .$Country == "Lao People's Democratic Republic" ~ "Laos",
      .$Country == "Czechia" ~ "Czech Republic",
      .$Country == "Timor-Leste" ~ "East Timor",
      .$Country == "Viet Nam" ~ "Vietnam",
      .$Country == "Brunei Darussalam" ~ "Brunei",
      .$Country == "Bahamas" ~ "The Bahamas",
      .$Country == "Côte d'Ivoire"  ~ "Ivory Coast",
      .$Country == "Guinea-Bissau"  ~ "Guinea Bissau",
      .$Country == "Syrian Arab Republic"  ~ "Syria",
      .$Country == "Iran (Islamic Republic of)"  ~ "Iran",
      .$Country == "Republic of Korea"  ~ "South Korea",
      .$Country == "Congo"  ~ "Republic of Congo",
      .$Country == "Serbia"  ~ "Republic of Serbia",
      .$Country == "Moldova"  ~ "Republic of Moldova",
      .$Country == "Bolivia (Plurinational State of)" ~ "Bolivia",
      TRUE ~ .$Country)) %>%
  full_join(globe) %>% filter(!is.na(formal)) %>%
  mutate(day = "01", month = "12", date = paste0(year, month, day),
         year = year(parse_date_time(date, orders = "ymd")),
         value = as.numeric(value)) %>%
  filter(!is.na(year))


b <- ggplot(booze, aes(frame = year)) + geom_sf(aes(fill = value)) +
  scale_fill_continuous(trans = "reverse", low = "#722f37", high = "white") + #nice wine colour
  theme_minimal() +
  guides(fill = guide_legend(title="Recorded alcohol\n consumption \n per capita"))

gganimate::gganimate(b, filename = "second.gif", interval = 2, ani.width=800, ani.height=600)


That works! Nice. Ok, it’s pretty simple, but given the hellish wrangling involved with some spatial polygon sets and administrative unit geographical data, I’m really impressed with how easy geom_sf() was to use. Good work, ggplot & sf folks!


  1. Refresh the page if it doesn't log in automatically. You're looking for "Annual prevalence, adults" > "Cannabis" > "Download as Excel". Sigh, just create an API, UN. AND these are .xls files. Grrrr!!! So you're better off opening it up and saving it as a .csv.
  2. I save both of these as gifs and store them on imgur, since they don't render correctly with blogdown for some reason].