Goal: The purpose of this lab is to be
able to download data from an outside source and upload it to ArcMap in order
to map the data.
Background: There is a plethora of
statistics on the US Census that provide a free and reliable source to extract
data regarding the US. This can specifically be used to determine trends in
smaller regions, such as Wisconsin and its counties.
Methods:
Tasks for Objective
One: Download 2010 Census Data
For this
objective, I needed to connect to the US Census website in order to obtain data
to download for my map. This required me to narrow down the search to find
statistics for the total population of Wisconsin in 2010. I made sure to
include all of the data for each Wisconsin county. After navigating to this
point, I downloaded the data and imported it to my personal GIS folder. From
here, I changed the tabular data Excel file into an Excel Worksheet to enable
me to add this information to ArcMap.
Tasks for Objective
Two: Download the shapefile for the WI census data.
For
objective two, I returned to the US census website and changed the tab atop the
‘geographies’ pop-up from ‘name’ to ‘map’. I navigated to the Wisconsin map
which included the counties. As with the population statistics, I downloaded
the map and added it to my ArcMap layer.
Tasks for Objective
Three: Join the data together
This step
required me to connect the data set for the map counties to the statistics I
obtained from the US Census Bureau. This required me to right- click the map
feature class to click join. I had to make sure that the tables matched in at
least one category to join the tables together. Their relating point in this
particular case was the Geo#ID.
Tasks for Objective
Four: Map the data
After the
data and map was joined together, I could finally navigate to the properties of
the map and choose quantities to specialize the graduated colors that appeared
for each county. In this case I wanted to equally distribute the color-to-population
ratio.
Tasks for Objective
Five: Map a variable of your choice.
This
objective made me create a new layer which basically created a second map of Wisconsin
with additional data. I chose to determine the number of vacant houses per
total houses in each county. This required me to again access the US Census
Bureau website. This time instead of using the people subtopic, I navigated to
the housing one. I downloaded the specific information which enabled me to see
the numbers of vacant houses as well as total number of houses per county. From
here I again had to change the downloaded statistics to an Excel Workbook file.
However, this time, the columns from the statistics file were different from
the metadata. This required me to switch one of the documents’ columns to rows
in order for the format to be the same between the documents. From here, I used
the same Wisconsin map as before and added the new data. Then, I was able to
join the attribute tables as I had previously in this lab. In order to project
the data to how I desired it, I needed to make the ‘value’ the number of vacant
homes in each county, and the ‘normalization’ the total number of homes in each
county. (*Note, one county displayed had a ‘null’ information set for these
particular statistics so it appears to be white on the map)
After finalizing the details of the
map’s data, I cleaned up both of the maps so that the titles matched what was
being viewed on the map. This included adding a North arrow, legend (and
tidying up the legend item descriptions), and scale bar. In addition, I added
the grey base map to give a sense of the area surrounding the state of
Wisconsin.
Results:
What I
noticed about the maps was the particular places in which there was a high
percentage of vacant homes. This often correlated with the highest population
in a particular county.
Sources:
Factfinder2.census.gov.
(2014). American factfinder - search. [online] Retrieved from:
http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/searchresults.xhtml?refresh=t
[Accessed: 5 Mar 2014].
