[acs-r] acs.R version 1.2: Now, with 2012 data

[M. Edward (Ed) Borasky]

I have a script that will extract table code names and their
definitions into CSV files so one can browse, rather than doing a
lookup via acs.r lookup functions. See
https://github.com/znmeb/pdxcensusdata/tree/master/csv. However, this
only covers 2012, 2011 and 2010, not earlier data. I suspect if there
are XML files on the Census Bureau site equivalent to the ones in
acs.r I could hack up the scripts to use them without much trouble if
you have a use for this.

As far as I can tell, choropleth.R only goes down to the county level,
not census tract, block group or block. I'm also talking to Ramnath
Vaidyanathan of rCharts (http://ramnathv.github.io/rCharts/) about
making Census choropleth maps using Leaflet.js, which will rended
automagically on Github Pages. I'm going to try to hack something up
for that this week in the above-linked project.

On Sat, Feb 1, 2014 at 7:13 PM,  <arilamstein at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Ezra,
>
> Thanks for including this update.  I'm having a tough time figuring out what
> data is available via acs.R.  From what you've said before, I gather that
> it's "whatever is available via the Census API".  But that is also not clear
> to me.  For example, I found this page on the census website, which I think
> lists all ACS ever conducted:
>
> http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/help/jsf/pages/metadata.xhtml?lang=en&type=survey&id=survey.en.ACS_ACS
>
> But when I tried to get the 2005 or 2007 ACS I get an error message and lots
> of warnings.  Do you have any documentation of what data your package
> supports retrieving?
>
> I am interested in making animated gifs where each frame is a choropleth of
> some demographic measurement at a particular year.  Right now that's
> difficult because I'm just going hit or miss thru the list, and it seems to
> be a lot of misses.
>
> Also, in version 1.0 of choroplethr I am just using the 2011 (default) ACS.
> In subsequent versions I would like users to use whatever (year, span)
> combinations acs.R supports.  I would also like to distribute a list of
> available data with my code, but right now I don't have one.
>
> Thanks.
>
> Ari
>
>
> On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Ezra Haber Glenn <eglenn at mit.edu> wrote:
>>
>>
>> Dear acs.R folks:
>>
>> As some of you have noticed, the new five-year Census ACS data has
>> just come out (see <http://www.census.gov/developers/data/>), and is
>> now available via the Census API. To make sure you are able to fetch
>> the freshest possible data to play with in R, I’ve updated the acs.R
>> package to version 1.2, which now includes full support for the
>> 2008–2012 ACS data.
>>
>> The latest version is now available on the CRAN repository -- see
>> <http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/acs/index.html>. If you’ve
>> already installed the package in the past, you can easily update with
>> the update.packages() command; if you’ve never installed it, you can
>> just as easily install it for the first time, by simply typing
>> install.packages(“acs”). In either case, be sure to load the library
>> after installing by typing library(acs), and install (or re-install)
>> an API key with api.key.install() — see the documentation and the
>> latest version of the acs user guide for more info.
>>
>> To get the latest data, just continue to use the acs.fetch() function
>> as usual, but specify endyear=2012. (By default, endyear is set to
>> 2011 if no year is explicitly passed to acs.fetch, and I didn’t want
>> to change this for fear of breaking existing user scripts. In the
>> future, we might to rethink this, so that it selects the most recent
>> endyear by default. Thoughts?)
>>
>> (Note: It might take a day or two for the updates to percolate through
>> the CRAN system.  If you update and you’re not sure which version you
>> are using, you can always type packageVersion(“acs”) to find out.)
>> --
>> Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP
>> Department of Urban Studies and Planning
>> Massachusetts Institute of Technology
>> 77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337
>> Cambridge, MA 02139
>> eglenn at mit.edu
>> http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn |
>> http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/
>> 617.253.2024 (w)
>> 617.721.7131 (c)
>>
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>
>
>
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