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This week, I mentioned a series of maps, on Twitter,some minimalist maps https://t.co/YCNPf3AR9n (poke @visionscarto) pic.twitter.com/Ip9Tylsbkv&#8212; Arthur Charpentier (@freakonometrics) 2 Septembre 2015Friday evening, just before leaving the office to pick-up the kids after their first week back in class, Matthew Champion (aka @matthewchampion) sent me an email, asking for more details. He wanted to know if I did produce those graphs, and if he could mention then, in a post. The truth is, I have no idea who produced those graphs, but I told him one can easily reproduce them. For instance, for the cities, in R, use&#62; library(maps)&#62; data("world.cities")&#62; plot(world.cities$lon,world.cities$lat,+ pch=19,cex=.7,axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")It is possible to get a more minimalist one by plotting only cities with more than 100,000 unhabitants, e.g.,&#62; world.cities2 = world.cities[+ world.cities$pop&#62;100000,]&#62; plot(world.cities2$lon,world.cities2$lat,+ pch=19,cex=.7,axes=FALSE,xlab="",ylab="")For the airports, it was slightly more complex since on http://openflights.org/data.html#airport, 6,977 airports  are mentioned. But on http://www.naturalearthdata.com/, I found another dataset with only 891 airports.&#62; library(maptools)&#62; shape &#60;- readShapePoints(+ "~/data/airport/ne_10m_airports.shp")&#62; plot(shape,pch=19,cex=.7)On the same website, one can find a dataset for ports,&#62; shape &#60;- readShapePoints(+ "~/data/airport/ne_10m_ports.shp")&#62; plot(shape,pch=19,cex=.7)This is for graphs based on points. For those based on lines, for instance rivers, shapefiles can be downloaded from https://github.com/jjrom/hydre/tree/, and then, use&#62; require(maptools)&#62; shape &#60;- readShapeLines(+ "./data/river/GRDC_687_rivers.shp")&#62; plot(shape,col="blue")For roads, the shapefile can be downloaded from http://www.naturalearthdata.com/&#62; shape &#60;- readShapeLines(+ "./data/roads/ne_10m_roads.shp")&#62; plot(shape,lwd=.5)Last, but not least, for lakes, we need the polygons,&#62; shape &#60;- readShapePoly(+ "./data/lake/ne_10m_lakes.shp")&#62; plot(shape,col="blue",border="blue",lwd=2)Nice, isn't it? See See the world differently with these minimalist maps for Matthew Champion's post.