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