President Hinckley has had a significant impact on temples in our history. Note the following two sections from The Teachings of President Hinckley
The inspiration for this plan had begun more than 20 years earlier, when President Hinckley was serving as chairman of the Church’s Temple Committee. Concerned that many Latter-day Saints did not have easy access to temple blessings, he wrote in his journal, “The Church could build [many smaller] temples for the cost of the Washington Temple [then under construction]. It would take the temples to the people instead of having the people travel great distances to get to them.”3
In 1997 a revelation from the Lord brought this idea to life. President Hinckley shared something about that revelation when he offered the dedicatory prayer for the Colonia Juárez Chihuahua Mexico Temple. *“It was here in Northern Mexico,” he prayed, “that Thou didst reveal the idea and the plan of a smaller temple, complete in every necessary detail, but suited in size to the needs and circumstances of the Church membership in this area of Thy vineyard.* That revelation came of a desire and a prayer to help Thy people of these colonies who have been true and loyal.”4
You can read more about the development of smaller temples here.
What visualizations could we make to help us understand the evolution of temple sizes since the organization of the church as it relates to President Hinckley?
The ldschurchtemples.org has some nice data on LDS temples. We will be using the following webpages to get size and timelines.
You can get the .Rmd file this this link
# http://bradleyboehmke.github.io/2015/12/scraping-html-tables.html
# https://selectorgadget.com/
pacman::p_load(tidyverse, sf, ggrepel, rvest, lubridate)temple_locs <- read_csv("https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/maps/gps/", locale = locale(encoding = "latin1"))
temple_geometry <- st_read("https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/maps/kml/timeline/")
temple_size <- "https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/statistics/dimensions/" %>% read_html() %>% html_nodes("table") %>% html_table() %>% .[[1]]
temple_time <- "https://churchofjesuschristtemples.org/statistics/milestones/" %>% read_html() %>% html_nodes("table") %>% html_table() %>% .[[1]]