Today my new course, Shapefiles for R Programmers, is available for preorder! This course is designed to open up new doors of data analysis for R programmers by teaching them how to work with shapefiles, using both GIS programs and R. Shapefiles are the most common method of storing maps, ...

Today I am happy to announce that a new version of choroplethr is now on CRAN. To get it type the following: The new version is 3.5.2. This version fixes two fairly pernicious bugs that were introduced in the last update to choroplethr. For reference, he is a detailed description of ...

Today I will demonstrate how the margin of error in American Community Survey (ACS) estimates grow as the size of the geography decreases.  The final chart that we’ll create is this: The way I interpret the above chart is this: The ACS is very confident about its state-level estimates. ...

After releasing my course Mapmaking in R with Choroplethr last December I received an interesting email from Dr. Herb Wilson, a biologist at Colby College. Herb studies the Red-breasted Nuthatch, which live throughout the United States and Canada. He asked if it was possible to use choroplethr to map the ...

A key feature of American Community Survey (ACS) data is that the reported values contain both estimates and margins of error. The margins of error, unfortunately, are often overlooked. After meeting with Ezra Glenn last year I gained a new appreciation of them. Today I’ll demonstrate how to visualize ...

A new version of choroplethr (v3.4.0) is now on CRAN. It allows you to combine Administrative Level 1 choropleths with reference maps. For reference, this functionality has been present for US maps for a while now (1, 2). This update just extends that functionality to the Administrative Level 1 mapping function, admin1_choropleth. To ...

A new version of ChoroplethrAdmin1 is now on CRAN, and it dramatically speeds up making Administrative Level 1 maps in choroplethr. “Administrative Level 1” is just a generic term for “1st subnational division”. In the US this is called a State, in Canada it’s called a Province, and so on. Overall, ...

In my course Learn to Map Census Data in R I provide people with a handful of interesting demographics to analyze. This is convenient for teaching, but people often want to search for other demographic statistics. To address that, today I will work through an example of starting with a ...

Last month I ran my first webinar (“Make a Census Explorer with Shiny”). About 100 people showed up, and feedback from the participants was great. I also had a lot of fun myself. Because of this, I’ve decided to do one more webinar before my free trial with the webinar ...

Last week I released an update to choroplethr that lets you combine choropleth maps with reference maps. Since that post many people have asked if it’s possible to change the reference map that choroplethr uses. The answer is yes, but it requires some code. Here is the same choropleth (...