What techniques exists in R to visualize a “distance matrix”?

Question

I wish to present a distance matrix in an article I am writing, and I am looking for good visualization for it.

So far I came across balloon plots (I used it here, b

Answer 1

A solution using Multidimensional Scaling

data = read.csv("http://datasets.flowingdata.com/ppg2008.csv", sep = ",")
dst = tcrossprod(as.matrix(data[,-1]))
dst = matrix(rep(diag(dst), 50L), ncol = 50L, byrow = TRUE) + 
  matrix(rep(diag(dst), 50L), ncol = 50L, byrow = FALSE) - 2*dst

library(MASS)
mds = isoMDS(dst)
#remove {type = "n"} to see dots
plot(mds$points, type = "n", pch = 20, cex = 3, col = adjustcolor("black", alpha = 0.3), xlab = "X", ylab = "Y") 
text(mds$points, labels = rownames(data), cex = 0.75)