ct-data-haven/acs_presentation

ioslides presentation on working with ACS.R

Making local ACS profiles in R

This is the repo for a presentation by Camille at DataHaven for NNIP partners to learn about working with the acs.R package. The slides are online here. All the same material is also available as an R notebook, so you can follow along and download the R Markdown document to mess around with the code. It's a walkthrough of my process in analyzing American Community Survey data on local towns and neighborhoods---but it doesn't have to be the way everyone writes their code!

Recommended resources

This presentation is pretty technical, as it covers the details of working with a specific R package. For anyone who needs to brush up on some R skills, I recommend:

• DataCamp: http://datacamp.com Costs money but is totally worth it for interactive courses
• Tutorials from RStudio: http://rstudio.com/online-learning
• R for Data Science free online book: http://r4ds.had.co.nz/
• swirl, package for R tutorials inside RStudio: http://swirlstats.com/

This presentation makes heavy use of the tidyverse packages. If you aren't comfortable with those (dplyr, tidyr, purrr, etc), all the above resources should help you out.

I'd also recommend checking out the acs.R handbook---34 pages of details about using the package, written by its author.

API key

To use acs.R, you need a free Census API key. If you try to use functions from this package, you'll get a prompt saying you need to install your key, with instructions on how to do so. Install it once, and it's saved in your RStudio preferences.

Questions?

Feel free to contact me at camille AT ctdatahaven DOT org.