ARcenso

Data from Argentina’s Population Census

Overview

This project was supported by the rOpenSci Champions Program 2023-2024, with Andrea Gomez Vargas as the main developer, Emanuel Ciardullo as co-author and Luis D. Verde Arregoitia as the mentor.

arcenso is a package under development that will allow access to the official data of the national population censuses in Argentina from the National Institute of Statistics and Census - INDEC. Currently, the results of the historical censuses of 1970, 1980, 1991, 2001, 2010 and 2022 are available in different formats through physical books, PDFs, Excel files or in REDATAM, without having a unified system or format that allows working with the data of these six census periods as a database. In addition, the presentation of the data is not homogeneous between the periods, making it difficult to make historical or serial comparisons of the available information.

This package aims to make census data available, homogenized and ready to use. It will include the census data from 1970 to 2022. Having a package of census information will allow the public and private sectors, citizens and other actors in society to access current and historical information on Argentina’s population, households and housing in a more accessible way.

The available data will be added to the package in stages as shown in the table below by year and geographic disaggregation. Currently, the package is in stage 1 of the roadmap.

Data Availability Roadmap

Stage	Census years	Geographic level	Notes
1	1970	National and 24 jurisdictions	First available census data
	1980	National level	Jurisdiction-level data not available
2	1991 and 2001	National level
3	2010	National level
4	2022	National level
5	1980 and 1991	24 jurisdictions
6	2001 and 2010	24 jurisdictions
7	2022	24 jurisdictions

Installation

You can install the development version of arcenso from GitHub with:

# install.packages("remotes")
# if you do not have remotes installed

remotes::install_github("SoyAndrea/arcenso")

Main functions

arcenso provides

• get_census(): get a list with the tables currently available in the package

• check_repository(): reports the tables currently available in the package

• arcenso_gui(): shinyapp to query the available tables in the package

Usage

First, load the library:

library(arcenso)

Exploring the Repository

Before downloading data, you can check which tables are available for a specific year, topic, and geographic level using check_repository():

check_repository(
  year = 1970, 
  topic = "CONDICIONES HABITACIONALES", 
  geolvl = "Total del país")
#>                            Archivo
#> 1 c70_total_del_pais_poblacion_c18
#> 2 c70_total_del_pais_poblacion_c20
#>                                                                                                      Titulo
#> 1    Cuadro 18. Total del país. Hogares particulares, personas y cuartos, por régimen de tenencia. Año 1970
#> 2 Cuadro 20. Total del país. Hogares particulares, por tamaño del hogar según régimen de tenencia. Año 1970

Accessing Census Data

Once you have identified the table you need, use get_census() to retrieve the data. This function returns a list containing the corresponding data frames:

# Download 1970 housing data
census_data_1970 <- get_census(
  year = 1970, 
  topic = "CONDICIONES HABITACIONALES", 
  geolvl = "Total del país"
)

# Preview the first table in the list
head(census_data_1970[[1]])
#> # A tibble: 5 × 4
#>   regimen_de_tenencia                 hogares personas cuartos 
#>   <chr>                               <chr>   <chr>    <chr>   
#> 1 Propietario                         3553250 13778700 11197900
#> 2 Inquilino o arrendatario            1380950 4692800  3305350 
#> 3 Ocupante en relación de dependencia 353300  1402500  880050  
#> 4 Ocupante gratuito                   575650  2271150  1196500 
#> 5 En otro carácter                    192950  816350   419800

Interactive Exploration (Shiny App)

The arcenso package includes a built-in interactive interface to explore and consult census tables without writing code. This is ideal for quick data discovery and browsing through historical records.

To launch the application locally, run:

# Launch the interactive Shiny application
arcenso_gui()

Look at the interactive interface in action:

Interactive Exploration with ARcenso

Citation

If you use ARcenso in your research or projects, please cite it as follows:

Gomez Vargas, A., & Ciardullo, E. (2025). arcenso: Data from Argentina’s Population Census. R package version 0.1.0. Available at: https://soyandrea.github.io/arcenso/

You can also get the BibTeX entry by running:

citation("arcenso")