Publications by Ari Lamstein
Free R Help
Today I am giving away 10 sessions of free, online, one-on-one R help. My hope is to get a better understanding of how my readers use R, and the issues they face when working on their own projects. The sessions will be over the next two weeks, online and 30-60 minutes each. I just purchased Screenhero, which will allow me to screen share during ...
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New Lesson: Mapping Historic Census Data in R
Today I am happy to announce a new lesson for my free email course Learn to Map Census Data in R. This lesson explains how to get and map historic census data in R. While I had intended this lesson to only go to new signups, it looks like my email provider sent it (along with resending the conclusion email!) to anyone who ever took the course. I ...
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User Question: How to Add a State Border to a Zip Code Map?
A user recently asked me how to add a state outline to a Zip Code map. Consider this map, which shows the percent white of each Zip Code Tabulated Area (ZCTA) in New York and New Jersey: Clearly the ZCTAs in northern New York have the highest concentration of white residents. However, it would still be useful to see the border between New York a...
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Combining Choropleth Maps and Reference Maps in R
Recent updates to my mapping packages now make it easy to combine choropleth maps and reference maps in R. All you have to do is pass the parameter reference_map = TRUE to the existing functions. This should “just work”, regardless of which region you zoom in on or what data you display. The following table shows the affected functions ...
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Free R Help: October Edition
Last Month I offered 10 slots of Free R Help and the response was overwhelming. About 100 people requested slots, which was much more than I expected. Many of the people who I helped had taken online R courses such as the Coursera Data Science Specialization, but were struggling with applying what they learned to their own projects. Overall I w...
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How to Change the Reference Map in Choroplethr
Last week I released an update to choroplethr that lets you combine choropleth maps with reference maps. Since that post many people have asked if it’s possible to change the reference map that choroplethr uses. The answer is yes, but it requires some code. Here is the same choropleth (New York City ZIP Code Income) with three different refer...
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Interactive Scatterplots of Census Data Using ggvis
Today I finished two projects that had been on my mind for a while: Try out ggvis, the interactive successor to ggplot2 Create interactive scatterplots of census data You can see the resulting shiny app here. The app lets you create a scatterplot of any pair of demographic variables that ship with the choroplethr package. When you roll over...
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Free Webinar: Make a Census Explorer with Shiny
Next Friday at noon PDT I will be hosting a free webinar titled Make a Census Explorer with Shiny. You can register for it here. Space is limited, so if you are interested then I recommend that you reserve your space today. The content will be very similar to the workshop that I ran at the San Francisco R-Ladies group in July. You can learn mo...
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Slides For My Upcoming Talk: “Mapping Census Data in R”
Next Tuesday I will be giving a talk at EARL 2015 in Boston. The title of my talk is “Mapping Census Data in R”. You can see my slides here: If you will be attending the conference then I hope to see you there! LEARN TO MAP CENSUS DATA Subscribe and get my free email course: Mapping Census Data in R! 100% Privacy. We don’t spam. The p...
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Interesting Datasets I Recently Learned About
Last week I spoke about my census-mapping work at two great venues: the EARL Conference in Boston and the NY Open Statistical Programming Meetup in New York. After my talks many people shared their own experiences mapping public datasets. I thought that I would pass along that information in case anyone is interested in exploring these datase...
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