Countries Visited Animated GIF

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Introduction

Since I am planning on using some gg_animate gifs for my thesis, it seemed like a good idea to start with a small project. This gif shows the countries I have visited thus far in order (or so I think, I haven’t gone through the photo albums yet). A lot of the code was inspired by this Github page. However, I did use the latest gg_animate grammar. Countries that I visited more than once, only show up the first time I visited them.

Packages

These are the R packages I used:

library(curl)
library(readxl)
library(data.table)
library(rworldmap)
library(ggplot2)
library(dplyr)
library(tweenr)
library(ggthemes)
library(rgeos)
library(countrycode)
library(gganimate)
library(knitr)
library(kableExtra)

Data

I created an Excel file with all countries in the world, which can be easily found on the internet. I just used the file used in above-mentioned Github page and cleaned that. Then I added an extra column with the order of which I visited the countries. Maybe, if I feel like it, I will update it and also add dates/years later. This is how the data then looks likes:

df <- read_excel(path= "countries_in order.xlsx", sheet=1)
df%>%
  head(13)%>%
  kable()%>%
  kable_styling(bootstrap_options =  c("striped", "hover", "condensed", "responsive"),
                full_width = F,
                position = "left")

Country	visit
Burundi	NA
Comoros	NA
Djibouti	NA
Eritrea	NA
Ethiopia	NA
Kenya	12
Madagascar	NA
Malawi	NA
Mauritius	NA
Mayotte	NA
Mozambique	NA
Réunion	NA
Rwanda	45

Data manipulation

First we add the ISO3 code to the data

setDT(df)
df[, country_iso3c := countrycode(Country, 'country.name', 'iso3c')]

Now we load the map and create the data.table we need for the polygon plotting in ggplot2.

wmap <- getMap()
wmap <- spTransform(wmap, CRS("+proj=robin")) # reproject
wmap <-   subset(wmap, !(NAME %like% "Antar")) # Remove Antarctica
wmap_df <- fortify(wmap, region = "ISO3")
wmap_df <- left_join(wmap_df, df, by = c('id'='country_iso3c'))

In order to add a grey background, that is not influenced by the animation, I simply duplicated the data.table and added a postscript to the variable names.

wmap_df2 <- wmap_df
colnames(wmap_df2) <- paste(colnames(wmap_df2), "2", sep = "_")

Make the plot

p <- ggplot() +
  geom_polygon(data = wmap_df,
               aes(x = long,
                   y = lat,
                   group = group),
               fill="#800000")+
  geom_polygon(data = wmap_df2, # this is the background map, that is not influenced by the animated part of the gif
               aes(x = long_2,
                   y = lat_2,
                   group = group_2),
               fill="grey",
               alpha=.3)+
  theme_void() +
  coord_cartesian(xlim = c(-11807982, 14807978)) +
  transition_manual(visit)+
  shadow_trail(distance = 0.01, alpha=.4) # add a small number for distance, to make all visited countries show.

Make and save the animation

This code is used to render and then save the GIF.

animate(p, duration=30)

anim_save("countries_visited.gif", animation = p, duration =30)

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