Creating-maps-in-R by Robin Lovelace.
From the webpage:
Introductory tutorial on graphical display of geographical information in R, to contribute to teaching material. For the context of this tutorial and a video introduction, please see here: http://robinlovelace.net/r/2014/01/30/spatial-data-with-R-tutorial.html
All of the information needed to run the tutorial is contained in a single pdf document that is kept updated: see github.com/Robinlovelace/Creating-maps-in-R/raw/master/intro-spatial-rl.pdf.
By the end of the tutorial you should have the confidence and skills needed to convert a diverse range of geographical and non-geographical datasets into meaningful analyses and visualisations. Using data and code provided in this repository all of the results are reproducible, culminating in publication-quality maps such as the faceted map of London’s population below:
Quite a treat in thirty (30) pages! You will have R and some basic spatial data packages installed and be well on your way to creating maps in R. From a topic map perspective, the joining of attributes to polygons is quite similar to adding properties to topics. Assuming you want to treat each polygon as a subject to be represented by a topic.
Enjoy!
PS:
You will also enjoy:
Cheshire, J. & Lovelace, R. (2014). Spatial data visualisation with R. In Geocomputation, a Practical Primer. In Press with Sage. Preprint available online
and other publications by Robin.