One major complaint about data.census.gov: you can’t access the older single year American Community Survey data for 2005 through 2009. (You could, in American FactFinder, but alas the AFF no longer exists!) So, if you want single year data for 2005 through 2018 for your large city/county/region, well, sorry Charlie.

I’ve toyed for years of using the “R” package for analyzing census data. I’m an old SAS package programmer, and I was always of the opinion (and custom) to just use SAS (and Excel, and AFF) for my basic analysis of any census data. But SAS is very expensive, and R is free, so, there might be something about “Teaching an Old Dog New Tricks” and to start learning/using R.

The key to analyzing census data in R is the Census Bureau’s API (Application Programming Interface.) I’ve heard about APIs for years (never knew what “API” stood for!), but it seemed like too much to learn when we had American Factfinder to get what we needed and wanted.

I’m not sure when I found out about the R package “tidycensus.” But it sounded worthwhile checking out, and I installed it on my home Mac desktop computer. This was in mid-May. Something for me to do while sheltering-in-place.

I then started to learn about “tidycensus” by watching various YouTube and Census Bureau videos. Tidycensus is a free, add-on R package created in 2017 by Professor Kyle Walker at TCU in Fort Worth, Texas. Along with “tidycensus” there is the “tidyverse” and “tigris” and other packages that I have yet to learn.

These YouTube/Census Bureau videos made learning “tidycensus” a breeze!!! I’m VERY impressed with what we can do with “tidycensus.”

On the other hand, I spent many hours learning how to do even the simplest things using “R”: concatenating (stacking) files; merging files using a join variable; reading and writing “csv” files; subsetting files, etc. I’m getting the hang of using “R” but my overall proficiency is still at a “newbie” level.

So, to wrap up this long introduction, here are various YouTube and Census Bureau webinar videos as a best introduction to tidycensus. I am highly recommending them to all census data analysts!!

Getting Started with R and R Studio by “How to R” (14:37, 9/1/2013)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVKMsaWju8w

Kyle Walker: Census Data in R: An Overview (3:54, 2/25/20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDyGuWrBC-M

Kyle Walker R Tutorial: Searching for data with tidycensus (3:10, 2/25/20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJRoubBvyq4

Kyle Walker: Basic tidy census functionality (2:30, 2/25/20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i09Pc7orAYg

Dr. Kyle Walker is an Associate Professor of Geography at the Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, Texas.

Mary Jo Webster: Using TidyCensus in R, part 1 (26:50, 4/3/20)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QW39e-ydytA&t=1s

Mary Jo Webster: Using TidyCensus in R, part 2 (18:37, 4/3/20)

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=tidycensus

Ms. Webster is a data journalist at the Star Tribune in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Amanda Klimek: Using the Census Bureau Application Programming Interface (API) with the American Community Survey (ACS), June 26, 2019, US Census Bureau webinar

https://www.census.gov/data/academy/webinars/2019/api-acs.html

Amanda Klimek is a survey statistician with the American Community Survey Office

Here’s the home page for tidycensus:

https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/tidycensus/index.html

I’m creating my own set of sample tidycensus r-scripts that I’m looking to share with the community. Let me know if this would help?

Stay safe!!

Chuck Purvis, Hayward, California

(formerly of the Metropolitan Transportation Commission, San Francisco, California)

clpurvis@att.net