Haunted Los Angeles - Interactive Mapping using Leaflet

library(tidyverse)
library(tidytuesdayR)
library(leaflet)

The following blog post is a very simple visualization using the data from tidytuesday 2023, week 41. This visualization uses the leaflet library to produce a very simple spatial analysis of the ‘haunted’ locations found in Los Angeles, CA.

We begin by loading the data from the tidytuesdayR package.

datas <- tt_load(2023, 41)

    Downloading file 1 of 1: `haunted_places.csv`

data <- datas$haunted_places

Next we take a glimpse of the data to see what we are working with.

glimpse(data)

Rows: 10,992
Columns: 10
$ city           <chr> "Ada", "Addison", "Adrian", "Adrian", "Albion", "Albion…
$ country        <chr> "United States", "United States", "United States", "Uni…
$ description    <chr> "Ada witch - Sometimes you can see a misty blue figure …
$ location       <chr> "Ada Cemetery", "North Adams Rd.", "Ghost Trestle", "Si…
$ state          <chr> "Michigan", "Michigan", "Michigan", "Michigan", "Michig…
$ state_abbrev   <chr> "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "MI", "…
$ longitude      <dbl> -85.50489, -84.38184, -84.03566, -84.01757, -84.74518, …
$ latitude       <dbl> 42.96211, 41.97142, 41.90454, 41.90571, 42.24401, 42.23…
$ city_longitude <dbl> -85.49548, -84.34717, -84.03717, -84.03717, -84.75303, …
$ city_latitude  <dbl> 42.96073, 41.98643, 41.89755, 41.89755, 42.24310, 42.24…

We next subset the data for the observations found in Los Angeles, CA. The longitude and latitude are then used to plot the locations on a map using the leaflet library. The ‘J.F.K. Library Third’ location is removed from the data as it is an outlier and is not located in Los Angeles, CA.

data |>
  filter(city %in% c('Los Angeles')) |>
  filter(state_abbrev == 'CA') |>
  filter(location != 'J.F.K. Library Third') |> 
  mutate(label = glue::glue('<b>{location}</b> <br> {description}')) |> 
  leaflet() |>
  addTiles() |>
  addMarkers(
    lng = ~ longitude,
    lat = ~ latitude,
    popup = ~ label
  )