R package for Post-2010 Census U.S. gazetteer data

NOTE: This is a large package (more than 50 MB) and will never be submitted to CRAN due to its size. But you can use drat to install it. See the installation section below.

Introduction

This package allows you to access gazetteer data released by the U.S. census bureau. This package is supplementary to the excellent tigris and the acs packages to work with U.S. census data.

Installation

Release version

This package will never be available on CRAN, but you can use drat package to install/upgrade it like any normal CRAN package.

if(!require(drat)) {
    install.packages('drat')
}

drat::addRepo('bhaskarvk') # Also add this to your $HOME/.Rprofile file.

#After this install it like any other R package.
install.packages('usgazetteer')

Development version

Stright from github using ‘devtools’.

if(!require(devtools)) {
  install.packages("devtools")
}
devtools::install_git('bhaskarvk/usgazetteer')

Data Provided

For now there is one data.frame ‘state.areas.2010’ and 6 lists (one for each year) …

  • gazetteer.2016
  • gazetteer.2015
  • gazetteer.2014
  • gazetteer.2013
  • gazetteer.2012
  • gazetteer.2010

The state.areas.2010 data.frame consists of state level gazetteer data from 2010 U.S. census. This data is consolidated from multiple sources, due to the fact that census bureau doesn’t supply it in a single file.

The state.areas.2010 is built from these sources

Although the state.areas.2010 is from 2010, this data should be fairly stable and not change (much).

Each of the ’gazetteer.*’ list is a list of data.frames, one data.frame for one type of gazetteer data. The names of types of gazetteer data each list contains can be queried by

library(usgazetteer)
names(gazetteer.2016)
##  [1] "115th Congressional Districts"                                                               
##  [2] "American Indian Reservations, Statistical Areas, and Alaska Native Village Statistical Areas"
##  [3] "Census Tracts"                                                                               
##  [4] "Core Based Statistical Areas"                                                                
##  [5] "Counties"                                                                                    
##  [6] "County Subdivisions"                                                                         
##  [7] "Current American Indian, Alaska Native, and Hawaiian Home Lands Legal and Statistical Areas" 
##  [8] "Current American Indian  Off-Reservation Trust Lands"                                        
##  [9] "Current Hawaiian Home Lands"                                                                 
## [10] "Places"                                                                                      
## [11] "School Districts - Elementary"                                                               
## [12] "School Districts - Secondary"                                                                
## [13] "School Districts - Unified"                                                                  
## [14] "State Legislative Districts - Lower Chamber"                                                 
## [15] "State Legislative Districts - Upper Chamber"                                                 
## [16] "Urban Areas"                                                                                 
## [17] "ZIP Code Tabulation Areas"


Individual data.frames can be access by their respective names.

library(usgazetteer)
counties.2016 <- gazetteer.2016$Counties
dplyr::glimpse(counties.2016)
## Observations: 3,220
## Variables: 12
## $ USPS        <chr> "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "AL", "A...
## $ GEOID       <chr> "01001", "01003", "01005", "01007", "01009", "0101...
## $ ANSICODE    <chr> "00161526", "00161527", "00161528", "00161529", "0...
## $ NAME        <chr> "Autauga County", "Baldwin County", "Barbour Count...
## $ ALAND       <dbl> 1539609015, 4117584019, 2291818680, 1612481559, 16...
## $ AWATER      <dbl> 25749942, 1133130502, 50864677, 9287974, 15077458,...
## $ ALAND_SQMI  <dbl> 594.446, 1589.808, 884.876, 622.583, 644.807, 622....
## $ AWATER_SQMI <dbl> 9.942, 437.504, 19.639, 3.586, 5.821, 2.338, 1.053...
## $ INTPTLAT    <dbl> 32.53224, 30.65922, 31.87025, 33.01589, 33.97736, ...
## $ INTPTLONG   <dbl> -86.64644, -87.74607, -85.40510, -87.12715, -86.56...
## $ ATOTAL      <dbl> 1565358957, 5250714521, 2342683357, 1621769533, 16...
## $ ATOTAL_SQMI <dbl> 604.388, 2027.312, 904.515, 626.169, 650.628, 625....


All the gazetteer files from 2010 to 2016 are obtained from http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/gazetteer.html. All the data found on the census.gov site is released under public domain.

License

This package is released under MIT license. The data itself comes from U.S. Census Bureau who release it under public domain.