Getting Started with Spatial Data

Workshop Description:

In the first half of the spatial data workshop, we will discuss several datasets offered by the US Census Bureau, focusing primarily on the American Community Survey data, which remains underutilized across research disciplines. The workshop will (1) provide an overview of geographic hierarchies reported on by the Census (e.g., counties, tracts, blocks, zip code tabulation areas) and (2) demonstrate how to access valuable Census data using the Census API in R.

The second half of the workshop will focus on easy ways to create beautiful but straightforward maps using R packages such as sf, ggplot2, and leaflet.

About Josemari Feliciano:

Jose is a data scientist with the USDA Innovation Center in Washington, D.C. As a critical member of the USDA-Census Bureau equity research team, he performs research under the Census Bureau's Social, Economic, and Housing Statistics Division, where he studies the impact of federal investments in Rural America across racial and ethnic groups. Before USDA, he earned his MPH in Biostatistics from the Yale School of Public Health and worked as a software engineer at Google and Facebook.