ABSTRACT
This is the first of two chapters that outline the programming methods we employed to generate community spatial models. The materials presented in each chapter are largely descriptive of the processes involved, and provide detailed examples of the programming scripts. Readers are invited to compile and run these scripts, or else to derive a basic framework for graph modelling to implement on their preferred programming platform. The script examples provided in this chapter are based on the R programming language, which offers the data structure utility of a ‘graph data frame’. This allows developers to describe connectivities between community assets, to format these with either geo-locational or network-theoretic layouts and to attach to the vertex and edge data structures different kinds of attribute data. As such, working with R underpins a set of powerful computational tools for the description of community formations in their spatial settings.
