Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

December 25, 2013

Discover Your Neighborhood with Census Explorer

Filed under: Census Data,Government Data — Patrick Durusau @ 2:57 pm

Discover Your Neighborhood with Census Explorer by Michael Ratcliffe.

From the post:

Our customers often want to explore neighborhood-level statistics and see how their communities have changed over time. Our new Census Explorer interactive mapping tool makes this easier than ever. It provides statistics on a variety of topics, such as percent of people who are foreign-born, educational attainment and homeownership rate. Statistics from the 2008 to 2012 American Community Survey power Census Explorer.

While you may be familiar with other ways to find neighborhood-level statistics, Census Explorer provides an interactive map for states, counties and census tracts. You can even look at how these neighborhoods have changed over time because the tool includes information from the 1990 and 2000 censuses in addition to the latest American Community Survey statistics. Seeing these changes is possible because the annual American Community Survey replaced the decennial census long form, giving communities throughout the nation more timely information than just once every 10 years.

Topics currently available in Census Explorer:

  • Total population
  • Percent 65 and older
  • Foreign-born population percentage
  • Percent of the population with a high school degree or higher
  • Percent with a bachelor’s degree or higher
  • Labor force participation rate
  • Home ownership rate
  • Median household income

Fairly coarse (census tract level) data but should be useful for any number of planning purposes.

For example, you could cross this data with traffic ticket and arrest data to derive “police presence” statistics.

Or add “citizen watcher” data from tweets about police car # and locations.

Different data sets often use different boundaries for areas.

Consider creating topic map based filters so when the boundaries change (a favorite activity of local governments) so will your summaries of that data.

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