Visualize US Census Data in R with tidycensus and mapgl

This 2.5 hour workshop will teach you all about how to acquire demographic data from the US Census Bureau and make stunning cartographic visualizations of your Census data with the brand-new mapgl R package.

In the first part of the workshop, you'll learn how to use the tidycensus R package for acquiring and analyzing US Census data on topics like income, race / ethnicity, home values, and much more. We'll then walk through how to create a wide range of interactive maps of US Census data such as choropleth, graduated symbol, and dot-density maps using the powerful Mapbox and MapLibre libraries available in the mapgl package.

In the second part, we'll cover how to solve common problems that arise when visualizing US Census data. This will include visualizing change over time in three dimensions; how to shift and rescale Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico on an interactive map; and best practices for performant large-scale demographic mapping, such as Census tracts across the United States!

The last part of the workshop was a live question-and-answer session where participants asked a range of mapping questions and got a live demo of some new features in mapgl.

What you'll get:

• Unlimited access to the workshop recording and chat log for future use;
• A step-by-step annotated tutorial in Quarto format to help you build your knowledge.

About the instructor:

Kyle Walker is an internationally-recognized researcher, consultant, and software developer in the field of spatial data science, and was the 2022 recipient of the Spatial Data Scientist of the Year award from the software company CARTO. He is the author of the book Analyzing US Census Data: Methods, Maps, and Models in R, and has published several popular software packages for spatial data science in R and Python including tidycensus that have been collectively downloaded over 1 million times.

What past workshop participants have said:

"I wanted to thank you for the amazing R mapping trainings you provided. They were extremely helpful and sparked some very exciting ideas about how our center can use these resources."

"One thing that really stood out was how you shared your own workflow through real-life examples. Seeing the direct application of tidycensus to our day-to-day tasks was a game-changer. It’s safe to say that we’re all feeling a lot more confident about integrating these techniques into our work."

"Your assistance in streamlining some of our existing workflows was a huge bonus. It’s not just the “how-to” that’s valuable, but also the practical insights you provided."

"Your excitement about the whole topic was infectious. It’s not easy to keep a group engaged... but you nailed it. Your enthusiasm made a huge difference."