Using my rudimentary knowledge of Python, I was interested in exploring the use of rpy2 to eventually be able to bring together spatial data analysis done in Python, with some higher level tools in R - in this case the powerful graphics library ggplot2 to visualize the results.
My setup is Mac OS 10.7.3, Python 2.7, R 2.14. (R needs to be compiled with '--enable-R-shlib', which the official CRAN binary for Mac is). Also required are Xcode and NumPy.
There is no binary for rpy2 for my configuration available, so I downloaded the source (2.2.3). Extract somewhere, change into the rpy2-2.2.3 directory and install with:
sudo python setup.py build install
The Python code below takes a csv file (output from a some prior geoprocessing done with ArcPy) and produces a graphic with a map and a scatterplot - see the comments for further details.
Data can be downloaded here.