15 new ideas and new tools for R gathered from the RStudio Conference 2019

Below we list the tools and innovations from the RStudio Conference in Austin, Texas that we found the most useful and exciting. As with last year’s conference, the event is well organized and the community of R users is enthusiastic and professionally diverse which makes for a fun and interesting conference. And, similar to last […]

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Creating beautiful demographic maps in R with the tidycensus and tmap packages

The tidycensus and tmap R packages make an incredible duo for working with and visualizing US Census data. The tidycensus package, authored by Kyle Walker, streamlines geographic and tabular data downloads while the tmap package, written by Martijn Tennekes, vastly simplifies creating maps with multiple layers, accepts many different spatial object types and makes it easy to add scale […]

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Writing efficient and streamlined R code with help from the new rlang package

The powerful new rlang package developed by Lionel Henry and Hadley Wickham at RStudio gives R programmers new tools to control evaluation of variables, compose formulas and functions and modify environments. R programmers can tackle these tasks without rlang, but the package gives us more straightforward approaches and solutions. Although broadly useful, to a certain […]

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Tips and tricks for working with images and figures in R Markdown documents

Writing reports in R Markdown allows you to skip painful and error-prone copy-paste in favor of dynamically-generated reports written in R and markdown that are easily reproducible and updateable. R Markdown reports that are heavy on graphs and maps, though, can yield large HTML files that are not optimized for web viewing. R Markdown offers […]

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Using the new R package, FedData, to access federal open datasets (including interactive graphics)

The FedData package (created by R. Kyle Bocinsky) is a great new R package that provides easy access to some important federal datasets. The package is well-designed and provides functions to download climate, elevation, hydrography and other data for your area of interest. The following five sources of data are currently available for download with […]

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Manipulating and mapping US Census data in R using the acs, tigris and leaflet packages

Census data the hard way Plotting census data with ggplot2 Interactive plotting with the leaflet package Options 1: Convert the data.frame back to a SpatialPolygonsDataFrame Options 2: Make use of the existing SpatialPolygonsDataFrame Census data the easy(er) way 1) Set up the packages 2) Get the spatial data (tigris) 3) Get the tabular data (acs) […]

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