5: Geospatial in R

Due Date

This assignment is due on Monday, February 16th

All assignments are due on D2L by 11:59pm on the due date. Late work is not accepted. You do not need to submit your .rmd file - just the properly-knitted PDF. All assignments must be properly rendered to PDF using Latex. Make sure you start your assignment sufficiently early such that you have time to address rendering issues. Come to office hours or use the course Slack if you have issues. Using an Rstudio instance on posit.cloud is always a feasible alternative. Remember, if you use any AI for coding, you must comment each line with your own interpretation of what that line of code does.

This assignment builds from the course materials for this week. Your assignment is to make a map of the change in an interesting census variable for your home county. If your home county is outside the US, you can use any county you like.

Exercise 1 of 1

  1. Load up all the necessary packages

  2. Find the FIPS for your home county

  3. Choose a variable you’re interested in. It can be an ACS or PUMS variable, but it has to be different from any of those we used in class.

  4. Using get_acs() or get_pums(), create a dataset with two different time periods and calculate the change in that variable between the time periods. If you use PUMs data, you’ll have to summarize the data for each PUMA in your county. Your county may have only one PUMA, or may even share its PUMA with other counties. That’s fine.

  5. Make a map of that variable at the census tract level showing the difference over time. Make sure you label it clearly!

  6. Write a few sentences describing the result and why you chose to that variable. Are there areas with more/less change? Based on what you know of your area, why?