Every decade, the US government spends a great deal of man-hours and money to collect the Census, which is the most comprehensive survey on the planet. Information gathered includes age, race, ethnicity, marital status, house ownership and more organized by location; and this data is freely available to the public online. The goal for this lab is to familiarize myself with retrieving and working with census data in GIS. We will ultimately create one map of Wisconsin population density by county, and one map of any variable of our choice in the state.
Methods:
The first step is to download the data desired from American Factfinder2 on the census bureau's website, which in itself is a multi-step process. For the data I want, WI population by county, I will select out the People, Basic Count/Estimate topic and the Counties, WI geography. This will narrow down the field of datasets, from which I choose the SF1 2010 data (ACS is the American Community Survey, which is less comprehensive than the Census.) Finally, the data is ready to download but I must be sure to download the shapefile if I don't already have one to which I will join my data. This is done by going to the geographies selection menu, and clicking on the "map" tab.
After unzipping asll of the downloaded files, we are ready to work in the GIS. First, make sure that the data is joined to the shapefile by joining the two by the GEO#id field, which is the US Census Bureau's unique identifyer for each location. Then, creating a map is as simple as setting up your symbology and adding the neccesities like a North Arrow, Legend, and Scale Bar.
Results:
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