campfin 
The campfin package was created to facilitate the work being done on the The Accountability Project, a tool created by The Investigative Reporting Workshop in Washington, DC. The Accountability Project curates, cleans, and indexes public data to give journalists, researchers and others a simple way to search across otherwise siloed records.
The data focuses on people, organizations and locations. This package was created specifically to help with state-level campaign finance data, although the tools included are useful in general database exploration and normalization.
Installation
You can install the released version of campfin from CRAN with:
install.packages("campfin")The development version can be installed from GitHub with:
# install.packages("remotes")
remotes::install_github("irworkshop/campfin")Normalize
The package was originally built to normalize geographic data using the
normal_*() functions, which take the messy self-reported geographic
data of a contributor, vendor, candidate, or committee and return
normalized text that
is more searchable. They are largely wrappers around the
stringr package, and can call
other sub-functions to streamline normalization.
normal_address()takes a street address and reduces inconsistencies.normal_zip()takes ZIP Codes and aims to return a valid 5-digit code.normal_state()takes US states and returns a 2 digit abbreviation.normal_city()takes cities and reduces inconsistencies.normal_phone()consistently formats US telephone numbers.
Please see the vignette on normalization for an example of how these functions are used to fix a wide variety of string inconsistencies and make campaign finance data more consistent.
Data
library(campfin)
library(tidyverse)The campfin package contains a number of built in data frames and strings used to help wrangle campaign finance data.
The /data-raw directory contains the code used to create the objects.
zipcodes
The zipcodes (plural) table is a new version of the zipcode
(singular) table from the archived
zipcode R
package.
This database was composed using ZIP code gazetteers from the US Census Bureau from 1999 and 2000, augmented with additional ZIP code information The database is believed to contain over 98% of the ZIP Codes in current use in the United States. The remaining ZIP Codes absent from this database are entirely PO Box or Firm ZIP codes added in the last five years, which are no longer published by the Census Bureau, but in any event serve a very small minority of the population (probably on the order of .1% or less). Although every attempt has been made to filter them out, this data set may contain up to .5% false positives, that is, ZIP codes that do not exist or are no longer in use but are included due to erroneous data sources.
The included valid_city and valid_zip vectors are sorted, unique
columns from the zipcodes data frame.
sample_frac(zipcodes)
#> # A tibble: 44,336 × 3
#> city state zip
#> <chr> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 SAN JUAN PR 00914
#> 2 BRANCHDALE PA 17923
#> 3 ATHENS IL 62613
#> 4 ALBANY GA 31706
#> 5 HULL IA 51239
#> 6 CHICAGO IL 60640
#> 7 WASHINGTON DC 20380
#> 8 LA HONDA CA 94020
#> 9 POMONA CA 91767
#> 10 OSHKOSH NE 69190
#> # … with 44,326 more rowsusps_* and valid_*
The usps_* data frames were scraped from the official United States
Postal Service (USPS) Postal Addressing
Standards. These data
frames are designed to work with the abbreviation functionality of
normal_address() and normal_city() to replace common abbreviations
with their full equivalent.
usps_city is a curated subset of usps_state, whose full version
appear at least once in the valid_city vector from zipcodes. The
valid_state and valid_name vectors contain the columns from
usps_state and include territories not found in R’s build in
state.abb and state.name vectors.
sample_n(usps_street, 3)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 2
#> full abb
#> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 PLAIN PLN
#> 2 COVE CV
#> 3 ARCADE ARC
sample_n(usps_state, 3)
#> # A tibble: 3 × 2
#> full abb
#> <chr> <chr>
#> 1 UTAH UT
#> 2 ALABAMA AL
#> 3 WISCONSIN WI
setdiff(valid_state, state.abb)
#> [1] "AS" "AA" "AE" "AP" "DC" "FM" "GU" "MH" "MP" "PW" "PR" "VI"The campfin project is released with a Contributor Code of Conduct. By contributing, you agree to abide by its terms.