A while back, on my CityState blog I posted a recipe (based on some great examples on the Revolution Analytics blog) showing how to use the acs package in R to create choropleth maps. Now, through the magic of open-source software development—and the hard work of developer Ari Lamstein and the generosity of his employers—this process has gotten even easier: I call your attention to Ari’s new choroplethr package for R.
Ari is a Senior Software Engineer at Trulia, where he works on data science and visualization, primarily related to real estate and housing markets. As part of the company’s “Innovation Week” he developed the choropleth package, moving well beyond the sample scripts to create a powerful suite of mapping functions. With a single command, a user can now generate maps at the state, county, or zip code level, from any of the data available via the ACS.
The package is not yet up on CRAN, but Ari promises that’s in the works; for now, you can learn more about it—including installation instructions using install_github()—on the Trulia Tech + Design blog. (I’m of course proud to note that my own acs.R package lies at the foundation of these tools, doing the heavy-lifting of fetching and processing up-to-date data from the American Community Survey—but Ari’s work is already moving beyond these humble roots, allowing users to create choropleth maps of any data they can get their hands on….)
To learn more about the types of projects undertaken by Trulia staffers during Innovation week, see this short video. Congratulations—and thanks—to both Ari and Trulia for helping to drive innovation forward in R and other open source projects.
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