Packages 2024 Wrapped

r-pkg

A late look at my R package updates from 2024.

Author
Published

March 21, 2025

It’s tax season, so I’m thinking about the past year. I never wrote a wrap up for 2024 on packages like I had done for 2023. So, here’s a late look at my R package updates from 2024.

Updates on CRAN

New packages

I’ve added six new package to CRAN this year, up from five in 2023. My hope is that this is going to settle down a bit in 2025, but there’s quite a bit of work in progress already…

alarmdata

alarmdata provides an interface to data from the ALARM Project. This gives a simple way to download data on things like congressional districts or precinct election results.





planscorer

planscorer is an R port (plus a little extra) of the python package for PlanScore. PlanScore is a tool for evaluating redistricting plans, particularly for partisan fairness. planscorer allows you to upload a plan to PlanScore and get back a report on the plan’s partisan fairness.





redistverse

The redistverse is a collection of packages for redistricting, centered on the award-winning R package, redist. This combines many of our packages for redistricting, like redist, redistmetrics, geomander, ggredist, censable, tinytiger, PL94171, and alarmdata into one easy-to-install bundle.





palette

palette is a package for creating color palettes. It’s based on the vctrs package, so it’s easy to use with the tidyverse. My hope is that this will be a useful tool for creating consistent color schemes across projects by providing basic methods for creating palettes.





baf

baf is a package for accessing Block Assignment Files (BAFs) from the US Census Bureau. These files crosswalk blocks from the decennial census to other geographies, like congressional districts or state legislative districts.





opengraph

opengraph is a package for reading metadata from web pages. With the Open Graph Protocol, many websites provide structured data about their pages. This allows packages like bskyr to provide a preview of a web page within posts. To see this in action, check out bskyr PR #18.





Updates to existing packages

One of the good parts of package development is that packages eventually reach a stable point. There will be bugs to fix or enhancements to make, but the bulk of the work is done. Among the 19 packages on CRAN going into 2024, 7 of them recieved a single update this past year.

Name Version Date Title
congress 0.0.3 2024-01-09 Access the Congress.gov API
bskyr 0.1.2 2024-01-09 Interact with 'Bluesky' Social
redist 4.2.0 2024-01-13 Simulation Methods for Legislative Redistricting
geomander 2.3.0 2024-02-15 Geographic Tools for Studying Gerrymandering
cvap 0.1.5 2024-03-21 Citizen Voting Age Population
crayons 0.0.3 2024-03-21 Color Palettes from Crayon Boxes
tinytiger 0.0.9 2024-06-04 Lightweight Interface to TIGER/Line Shapefiles
redistverse 0.1.0 2024-06-18 Easily Install and Load Redistricting Software

Package Downloads

Below are the cumulative downloads for each package over the last year by day.

As with last year’s post, a single summary of total downloads misses that some packages have been available for longer than others. One (simple) way to account for this is to adjust the downloads by the number of days the package has been available. Of course, this doesn’t account for potential trends where a brand new package is less likely to be downloaded than a package that has been around for at least a few weeks.

Package Days
Downloads
Raw Adjusted
planscorer 313 5,976 6,969
redistverse 197 3,492 6,470
alarmdata 308 2,736 3,242
palette 292 2,548 3,185
baf 211 1,604 2,775
opengraph 22 163 2,704

Comparison in growth

Now that there’s a fair bit of packages that have been around for at least two years, we can compare the growth in downloads.

Package
Downloads
Growth
2023 2024
congress 5,387 8,439 156.65%
geomander 3,803 4,900 128.85%
tinytiger 6,101 7,791 127.70%
name 3,008 3,833 127.43%
redistmetrics 3,013 3,795 125.95%
ppmf 2,132 2,547 119.47%
ggredist 2,301 2,699 117.30%
dots 2,141 2,439 113.92%
jot 1,833 2,027 110.58%
censable 3,668 4,034 109.98%
redist 5,057 5,169 102.21%
cvap 3,151 3,126 99.21%
divseg 3,614 3,566 98.67%
PL94171 4,843 4,514 93.21%

(Ongoing) Development in 2025

There’s always more to do. This year, I’m working on getting redistio into research shape, with a lot of interest in using Kyle Walker’s new mapgl as a modern alternative to leaflet. With a dissertation to finalize in the next few weeks and a postdoc in the fall, there’s a fair bit of focus on building out typesetting tools for academic writing, likely leading to some new packages related to Quarto and Typst in the near future.

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{t._kenny2025,
  author = {T. Kenny, Christopher},
  title = {Packages 2024 {Wrapped}},
  date = {2025-03-21},
  url = {https://christophertkenny.com/posts/2025-03-21-software-2024/},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
T. Kenny, Christopher. 2025. “Packages 2024 Wrapped.” March 21, 2025. https://christophertkenny.com/posts/2025-03-21-software-2024/.