Developing Geographic Thematic Maps with R

Question

There are clearly a number of packages in R for all sorts of spatial analysis. That can by seen in the CRAN Task View: Analysis of Spatial Data. These packages are numerous

Answer 1

It is just three lines!

library(maps);
colors = floor(runif(63)*657);
map("state", col = colors, fill = T, resolution = 0)

Done!! Just change the second line to any vector of 63 elements (each element between 0 and 657, which are members of colors())

Now if you want to get fancy you can write:

library(maps);
library(mapproj);
colors = floor(runif(63)*657);
map("state", col = colors, fill = T, projection = "polyconic", resolution = 0);

The 63 elements represent the 63 regions whose names you can get by running:

map("state")$names;