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.
tigris, rgdal, sp, UScensus2010, USABoundaries, choroplethr, ggplot2, sp, rappdirs, dplyr, tmap, shiny, leaflet, devtools
Spatial, SpatioTemporal, Graphics, OfficialStatistics, Phylogenetics, WebTechnologies
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For attribution, please cite this work as
Walker, "The R Journal: 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 = {The R Journal: 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}
}