#MusaMasterclass featuring Kyle Walker: New Rstats Transportation Analysis Tools

The #MusaMasterClass is a community lecture and workshop hosted by the Master of Urban Spatial Analytics program (MUSA), Penn IUR, and the Weitzman School of Design. The Fall 2020 Master Class on October 9 was led by Dr. Kyle Walker, Associate Professor of Geography and Director, Center for Urban Studies, Texas Christian University. Walker is the author of several notable geospatial Rstats packages including tidycensus and mapboxapi, his newest package, which makes a host of complex transportation network and routing tools accessible to beginners. In this workshop, he taught participants how to use mapboxapi, which incorporates the suite of Mapbox tools into spatial data science projects.

Walker began the lecture by detailing his graduate work as a population geographer and his early professional work with RStudio and open-source programs. At the time he received his PhD at the University of Minnesota, RStudio was growing in popularity, which Walker observed was due to “its ability to interface with so many software ecosystems,” allowing multiple tools and programming languages to be integrated “into a single project.” This philosophy has informed much of his subsequent open-source work, including the creation of the tigris and tidycensus packages in R.

Walker also noted that the collaborative nature of such projects dramatically enhances the final product: “Working within an open-source context, there’s so much innovation going on around it that invariably, if you’re plugging into that framework, everything is always going to be improving.”

Walker started using Mapbox, a location data platform that powers maps and location services, for his project Mapping Immigrant America, released in 2015 and updated in 2020. Mapping Immigrant America is a dot-density representation of the U.S. immigrant population, with general region of origin represented by the color of each dot. He created mapboxapi to help R users incorporate Mapbox web services into their maps, as well as to apply the R interface to Mapbox in order to combine different Mapbox services and create a bridge between them.

Following Walker’s lecture, he led a live tutorial of mapboxapi for participating students and members of the public. To view the projects completed by event participants on additional datasets, see the Twitter hashtag #MusaMasterClass. Tutorial materials and recordings of the 2019 and 2018 MUSA Master Classes can be found here.