Category Archives for Open Data

New Resource for Learning Choroplethr

Last week I had the honor of giving a 1 hour talk about Choroplethr at a private company. When this company reached out to me about speaking there, I originally planned to give the same talk I gave at CDC two years ago. But as I reviewed the CDC talk, I realized two things: My […]

Bug when Creating Reference Maps with Choroplethr

New Free R Course on Census.gov!

Today I am happy to announce that a new free course on Choroplethr – Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr – is available on Census Academy, the US Census Bureau’s new training platform! (Choroplethr is a suite of R packages I created for mapping demographic statistics).This course is a more in-depth version of Learn […]

“A Guide to Working With Census Data in R” is now Complete!

Two weeks ago I mentioned that I was clearing my calendar until I finished writing A Guide to Working with Census Data in R. Today I’m happy to announce that the Guide is complete! I even took out a special domain for the project: RCensusGuide.info. The Guide is designed to address two problems that people who […]

Update on R Consortium Census Guide

As I mentioned in July, my proposal to the R Consortium to create a Guide to Working with Census Data in R was accepted. Today I’d like to share an update on the project. The proposal breaks the creation of the guide into four milestones. So far Logan Powell and I have completed two of those milestones: […]

Notes from the 2018 APDU Conference

I recently attended the 2018 Association of Public Data Users (APDU) conference. This was my second time attending the conference, and I enjoyed learning more about how other people use federal statistics. Some of my favorite presentations were: Julia Lane on her experience teaching Big Data to social scientists and government workers. The Bureau of […]

Census Academy Update!

Last year I announced a collaboration with the Census Bureau to help with their new online training platform. This website, called “Census Academy”, is designed to help the public learn how to work with data that the Census Bureau publishes. Census Academy recently had a soft launch, and there is already a lot of content on […]

My Proposal to the R Consortium

I recently submitted a Proposal to the R Consortium. I decided to share this proposal on my blog for two reasons: To raise awareness of an opportunity I see in the R ecosystem. To raise awareness of the R Consortium as a funding source for R projects. I first learned about the R Consortium when […]

Update on My Collaboration with the Census Bureau

In November I announced a new collaboration with the Census Bureau around data science training. Today I’d like to provide an update on this project. I recently presented a draft of my first course for this project internally and it was well received. The working title of this course is Mapping State ACS Data in […]

R Programmers: What is your biggest problem when working with Census data?

A few weeks ago I announced my latest project: Data Science instruction at the Census Bureau. In addition to announcing the project, I also snuck a bit of market research into the post. I asked people the types of analyses they do when working with Census data. I also asked what packages they use when […]