This course is being offered in collaboration between the Odum Institute and the Center for Urban & Regional Studies.

This one day course will be offered via Zoom. Attendance is required as the course will not be recorded.

In the past, working with US Census data in its various forms required gathering the data from numerous locations and using multiple software packages to process, analyze, and visualize it. Fortunately, recent improvements in census data delivery systems have made it far easier to acquire the data, greatly reducing the startup costs for people interested in working with the data. Additionally, new tools such as the tidycensus library in the R programming language offer a streamlined environment for acquiring, processing, and analyzing the census data products.

This one-day workshop will provide a hands-on, guided introduction to working with US Census data using tidycensus in R. The course will focus on using geographically-referenced demographic and socioeconomic data from the decennial census and American Community Survey (ACS). Participants will learn how to acquire data, perform basic data preprocessing tasks (e.g., subset, query, join), create basic visualizations (e.g., maps, plots, and graphs), and perform basic spatial and statistical analysis (e.g., correlation). Some experience with coding (particularly in R) is strongly recommended. Prior to the course, participants are required to have a working version of R (or RStudio) with the tidycensus library library installed. Participants are also required to register for a Census API Key.