How to Plot Data on an Interactive Globe

This article describes how to go from summarized global geographic data, such as the population of capital cities around the world:

To a state where the summarized data is captured in an interactive globe visualization:

Requirements

You will need a nominal variable that represents a geographic area and a numeric variable in your Data Sources tree.

Method

1. Upload the file by clicking Add Data and selecting the appropriate method (see How to Import Data Into Displayr for more information. In this example, I am loading in data from a URL: https://wiki.q-researchsoftware.com/images/e/e2/WUP2018-F13-Capital_Cities.xls.
2. Ensure that a numeric variable is available in your data set. In this example, the Population (thousands) variable is imported as numeric (you can tell by the number "2" before the variable name).
3. From the toolbar, go to Calculation > Custom Code.
4. Click on the page to place the output.
5. Paste the following code in the Code panel and click Calculate:

library(threejs)
library(flipChartBasics)

# Make a data.frame of the required information
x <- data.frame(long = Longitude, 
lat = Latitude, 
population = `Population (thousands)`, 
city = `Capital City`)

# Set colors according to first letter of city name
first.letters <- sapply(substring(x$city, 1, 1), 
utf8ToInt) - utf8ToInt("A") + 1
palette <- ChartColors(26, "Blues")
colors <- palette[first.letters]

# Plot the data on the globe
earth <- "http://eoimages.gsfc.nasa.gov/images/imagerecords/73000/73909/world.topo.bathy.200412.3x5400x2700.jpg"
globejs(img = earth,
lat = x$lat,
long = x$long,
val = 10 * log(x$population), 
color = colors,
pointsize = 5,
atmosphere = FALSE,
bg = "white")