tigris: An R Package to Access and Work with Geographic Data from the US Census Bureau

TIGER/Line shapefiles from the United States Census Bureau are commonly used for the mapping and analysis of US demographic trends. The tigris package provides a uniform interface for R users to download and work with these shapefiles. Functions in tigris allow R users to request Census geographic datasets using familiar geographic identifiers and return those datasets as objects of class “Spatial*DataFrame”. In turn, tigris ensures consistent and high-quality spatial data for R users’ cartographic and spatial analysis projects that involve US Census data. This article provides an overview of the functionality of the tigris package, and concludes with an applied example of a geospatial workflow using data retrieved with tigris.

Kyle Walker
2016-08-11

CRAN packages used

tigris, rgdal, sp, UScensus2010, USABoundaries, choroplethr, ggplot2, sp, rappdirs, dplyr, tmap, shiny, leaflet, devtools

CRAN Task Views implied by cited packages

Spatial, SpatioTemporal, Graphics, OfficialStatistics, Phylogenetics, WebTechnologies

Reuse

Text and figures are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution CC BY 4.0. The figures that have been reused from other sources don't fall under this license and can be recognized by a note in their caption: "Figure from ...".

Citation

For attribution, please cite this work as

Walker, "tigris: An R Package to Access and Work with Geographic Data from the US Census Bureau", The R Journal, 2016

BibTeX citation

@article{RJ-2016-043,
  author = {Walker, Kyle},
  title = {tigris: An R Package to Access and Work with Geographic Data from the US Census Bureau},
  journal = {The R Journal},
  year = {2016},
  note = {https://doi.org/10.32614/RJ-2016-043},
  doi = {10.32614/RJ-2016-043},
  volume = {8},
  issue = {2},
  issn = {2073-4859},
  pages = {231-242}
}