Explore geographic data

[jmhernan]

We can begin looking at WA state census geographical area data. We can access these files here

I wouldn't download these files directly to your machines, I wrote a simple script to begin exploring these while grabbing them directly from the web-site and storing them in temporary storage. See full script here.

# create a couple temp files
temp <- tempfile()
temp2 <- tempfile()

# download the zip folder from the internet save to 'temp'
download.file(
  "https://ofm.wa.gov/sites/default/files/public/legacy/pop/geographic/tiger10/tract10.zip",
  temp)

If we were to use tracts as our geographic aggregation, how would we measure distances between them? (e.g midpoint)

[jmhernan]

this is the package that i'm using for this:
https://r-spatial.github.io/sf/
Super cool!