Mapping the Vikings using R

The commute to my workplace is 90 minutes each way. Podcasts are my friend. I’m a long-time listener of In Our Time and enjoyed the recent episode about The Danelaw. Melvyn and I hail from the same part of the world, and I learned as a child that many of the local place names there were derived from Old Norse or Danish. Notably: places ending in -by denote a farmstead, settlement or village; those ending in -thwaite mean a clearing or meadow. So how local are those names? Time for some quick and dirty maps using R. First, we’ll need a dataset of British place names. There are quite a few of these online, but top of my Google search was Index of Place Names in Great Britain (July 2016). It comes in several formats including CSV, easy to read into R like so: library(tidyverse) library(maps) gbplaces <- read_csv("https://opendata.arcgis.com/datasets/a6c138d17ac54532b0ca8ee693922f10_0.csv?outSR=%7B%22latestWkid%22%3A27700%2C%22wkid%22%3A27700%7D") A quick inspection of the data reveals that whilst there is a unique identifier, objectid_1, each row is not as such a unique place (the dataset is based on grid locations). We can reduce the number of rows a little by taking distinct(placesort, lat, long_), but that will still retain duplicate place names with slightly different coordinates. For our purposes, it doesn’t really matter – we just want an indication of distribution, rather than a highly-accurate map. We’ll start by lookin...
Source: What You're Doing Is Rather Desperate - Category: Bioinformatics Authors: Tags: R statistics ggplot2 history maps podcast rstats viking Source Type: blogs