Got any good examples or ideas of / for U.S. Census data displays?
I ask this question for two reasons:
- It’s for a project I’m working on.
- I looked through the U.S.A. Today’s site, and the NY Times’, and didn’t find any good examples.
Right now I’ve got a few ideas for census data display (below), but I’m looking for more.
- Compare: Takes two or more neighborhoods / zip codes / cities / counties and compares per-capita / absolute values in major + minor census fields.
- Editor Picks: We publish links to comparisons of note and charts of note here – it’s a way to highlight interesting data points that could get lost in the shuffle otherwise.
- Graphics Library: The graphics we create in the print edition often get lost in the article they’re associated with. The Graphics Library is an index of the census graphics we’ve created, and link the graphic back to the original article.
- What’s Your Tract? This feature allows people to type in their address, or click their location on a map of Colorado, and then delivers them their census tract-, city- and county-level census information.
- Build a Map: This may not be “Build a Map” as much as it is “here are some things you can map, choose one.” The idea is creating by-county heatmaps of various census fields.
- Where We Rank: A selection of charts comparing Colorado’s per-capita demographics to other states, as well as comparing Colorado county per-capita demographics to other Colorado counties.
- How We’ve Changed: We’ve got data from the 2000 and the 1990 Censuses available to us. With that data we can tell the story of what’s changed, and at what rate, on a state, county and city level. The rate of change is likely to be the more interesting part of this data set, and that story can be told with heatmaps and charts, organized by demographic and location-type.
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Following on [Phillip's question] (http://help.hackshackers.com/questions/611/hacks-hackers-and-mozilla-want-to-know-how-should-we-structure-an-online-curriculum) about a Hacks/Hackers course, we are looking for a few volunteers to help us turn it into an actual course to be offered in September 2010 (start date 15 Sep).
Some of you already offered to help with individual topics (thank you!) and we'd like to form a small core group of people from Hacks/Hackers, Mozilla, and P2PU who will take the lead on pulling it all together and facilitating a group of peer-learners to work through the materials.
There isn't a huge amount of time to plan, and since this is the first time we are trying this, things are still a little experimental - but the idea is to learn, iterate, and improve rapidly.
We've already started some of the legwork (and used your input from the earlier discussion). The next steps are:
- Update the basic six week outline we have put together on the P2PU wiki
- Build out the readings for each weeks' topic, e.g.: compile a list of relevant online talks, presentations, articles, etc.
- Define specific tasks that a group of peer-learners can work through together
- Sign up additional case-studies or subject matter experts who could join live seminars in each week. We already have several committed (you can see the list in progress here), but we're still looking for more.
We'll also need help during the course -- we'll need volunteers to help facilitate the discussion, and to help a group of learner work through the materials together.
So, if this is something you'd be willing to put a few hours of your time into or take leadership on (with our support) - please let us know by subscribing to the Google Group here.
We'll be kicking off the course planning on Tuesday, August 17th (that's tomorrow) -- so be sure to sign-up today if you're interested.
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Scatter Plot: Good way to identify outliers. You could let your readers select from a variety of subjects and then see how various neighborhoods/counties/etc stack up.
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I’m excited to watch this project and wish you the best of luck. It’s a worthy project.