Assignment for Week 10: Databases and APIs

Due by Sunday, November 2, 2025

Read

• Get a Census API key. See https://api.census.gov/data/key_signup.html.
• Install the tidycensus package.
• Install the sf package if you haven’t already.
• Read Basic Usage of Tidycensus, which amongst other things will tell you what to do with the API key.
• Read Spatial Data with Tidycensus.
• Read Margins of Error in the ACS.
• Read Other Cenus Bureau Datasets

Do

• Choose some Census geography smaller than a state—counties, tracts, or ZTCAs, for example. Find a Census variable—just one is fine—that you are interested in for those areas, either from the Decennial census or the ACS 5-year estimates. Download the data using tidycensus::get_acs() or tidycensus::get_decennial(). Try to make a couple of tables, graphs, or maps that illustrate something interesting about the variable you chose. Do all of this as an RStudio project with a Quarto document, use Git to version-control the project and put the resulting exercise (the qmd file, not an HTML or PDF) on GitHub.