Today I am happy to announce that a new free course on Choroplethr – Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr – is available on Census Academy, the US Census Bureau’s new training platform! (Choroplethr is a suite of R packages I created for mapping demographic statistics).

This course is a more in-depth version of Learn to Map Census Data in R, the first Choroplethr course I published in 2015. That course walks you through the steps necessary to create this map, which shows how US Per Capita Income has changed over time.

Mapping Census Bureau Data in R with Choroplethr goes into much more detail. It has 18 video lessons spread over five modules, and you can download the slides and code used in each lesson.

I am most excited by Module 4 of the course (“Data Details”), which goes into more detail about US Census data than I have previously taught. It also details advanced support that Choroplethr provides for working with the Census API. Specific topics include:

1. What the American Community Survey (ACS) is, and how it differs from the Decennial Census
2. Nuances of ACS data, such as span and margin of error
3. How to search for ACS data
4. How to load arbitrary ACS tables with Choroplethr

You can take the course for free here.

I would like to thank Jeff Meisel, former CMO of the Census Bureau, for championing the idea for this course and Census Academy. I would also like to thank Alexandra Barker, a Supervisory Program Analyst at Census, for helping to make the course a reality!