<div dir="ltr"><div>Hi Ezra,<br></div><div><br></div><div>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:</div>
<div><br></div><div><a href="http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/help/jsf/pages/metadata.xhtml?lang=en&type=survey&id=survey.en.ACS_ACS">http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/help/jsf/pages/metadata.xhtml?lang=en&type=survey&id=survey.en.ACS_ACS</a><br>
</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">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?</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">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.</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Thanks.</div><div class="gmail_extra"><br></div><div class="gmail_extra">Ari <br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 5:30 PM, Ezra Haber Glenn <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:eglenn@mit.edu" target="_blank">eglenn@mit.edu</a>></span> wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex"><br>
Dear acs.R folks:<br>
<br>
As some of you have noticed, the new five-year Census ACS data has<br>
just come out (see <<a href="http://www.census.gov/developers/data/" target="_blank">http://www.census.gov/developers/data/</a>>), and is<br>
now available via the Census API. To make sure you are able to fetch<br>
the freshest possible data to play with in R, I’ve updated the acs.R<br>
package to version 1.2, which now includes full support for the<br>
2008–2012 ACS data.<br>
<br>
The latest version is now available on the CRAN repository -- see<br>
<<a href="http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/acs/index.html" target="_blank">http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/acs/index.html</a>>. If you’ve<br>
already installed the package in the past, you can easily update with<br>
the update.packages() command; if you’ve never installed it, you can<br>
just as easily install it for the first time, by simply typing<br>
install.packages(“acs”). In either case, be sure to load the library<br>
after installing by typing library(acs), and install (or re-install)<br>
an API key with api.key.install() — see the documentation and the<br>
latest version of the acs user guide for more info.<br>
<br>
To get the latest data, just continue to use the acs.fetch() function<br>
as usual, but specify endyear=2012. (By default, endyear is set to<br>
2011 if no year is explicitly passed to acs.fetch, and I didn’t want<br>
to change this for fear of breaking existing user scripts. In the<br>
future, we might to rethink this, so that it selects the most recent<br>
endyear by default. Thoughts?)<br>
<br>
(Note: It might take a day or two for the updates to percolate through<br>
the CRAN system. If you update and you’re not sure which version you<br>
are using, you can always type packageVersion(“acs”) to find out.)<br>
--<br>
Ezra Haber Glenn, AICP<br>
Department of Urban Studies and Planning<br>
Massachusetts Institute of Technology<br>
77 Massachusetts Ave., Room 7-337<br>
Cambridge, MA 02139<br>
<a href="mailto:eglenn@mit.edu">eglenn@mit.edu</a><br>
<a href="http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn" target="_blank">http://dusp.mit.edu/faculty/ezra-glenn</a> | <a href="http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/" target="_blank">http://eglenn.scripts.mit.edu/citystate/</a><br>
<a href="tel:617.253.2024" value="+16172532024">617.253.2024</a> (w)<br>
<a href="tel:617.721.7131" value="+16177217131">617.721.7131</a> (c)<br>
<br>
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</blockquote></div><br></div></div>