March 22, 2005
With the first website that came up, the US census site, I could easily access census data for each state. So I decided to look at the other sites to compare the results. The next site, geostat center, also had the population for the states and counties, but only up through 1960. I next went to the US American Factfinder site, and while it was relatively easy to find information on the 200 census, and even some information on the 1990 census, it was very difficult to find any other years. I went to a few other sites, such as the National Atlas, that didn’t have the information I was looking for.
When I used the ‘historical population data’ in the search, I came up with some of the same sites, including having the US census site being the first one. I then found that most of the sites that came next were specific to particular states, and not the whole US. This search was not as helpful and relevant, and it would take much longer to find the information I was looking for.
I find overall, with exception to the US census site itself, you must do a lot of searching through many sites to find all of the information you would need. In a search with a keyword, the search engine tends to find each word separately unless you put quotes around it, and that can cause a lot of wasted time looking through sites that do not have the information you need.
In yahoo categories I first clicked on ‘all Y! services’ to go to the index list, and I did not find anything that had any information about US historical census data. I then typed the information in the search category and I got the same results that I had before with google.
I had no trouble finding the data I needed on the U.S census website. I went to the selected US historical data, and scrolled down to Counties, States, United States Header. The link is called population census counts, and from there you can click on any state you want and it will show you the population for the whole state and for each county from 1900 to 1990. For the 2000 results, I selected my states from the drop down list under data highlights of the 2000 census, which gave me not only the population for the state and each county, but also housing units, total land area, water area, total area, and population density.
In dogpile and ask jeeves, I got a lot of the same results. The first two were parts of the US census site, and then the geostat site. I found one site that was interesting, www.census-online.com. In this site, you can choose a state, click on a particular county, and access census data back to 1790. There was even a link to an old 1909 city directory of Plymouth MA. I also found at ancestry.com, which you can buy a membership and find different census information from 1790 -1930, including facts about people like age, residence, and occupation.
3/23/05These are the site addresses for the census information I got for 1900 – 1990:
NH = http://www.census.gov/population/cencounts/nh190090.txt, “Population by Counties by Decennial census: 1900 – 1990”For the 2000 census I used the geographic comparison tables:
NH = http://factfinder.census.gov/servlet/GCTTable?_bm=y&-geo_id=04000US33&-_box_head_nbr=GCT-PH1&-ds_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U&-redoLog=false&-mt_name=DEC_2000_SF1_U_GCTPH1_ST2&-format=ST-2When searching for information on my four states, I used google, and first typed in New England states. I really got a lot of miscellaneous information, and the first site I came up with that was really any relavant information was half way down the second page with http://www.bls.gov/ro1/home.htm . This site give you all sorts of information about population, unemployment, and wages. I also found a site on New England Tourism http://www.visitnewengland.com/ and another one specifiaclly about the outdoors in New England at http://www.gonewengland.org/. When I typed in "people in New England" I found much more stuff that was historical in nature, such as, http://www.17thc.us/ and http://gonewengland.about.com/od/historicpeople/. But I also found http://www.disabilityinfo.org/ interesting with an index of the people living in New England that have disabilities.
In searching for relavant books I found many that were historical, and most of them were for before the 1900's. For example, I found "Those who stayed behind", and "Colonial NE, a historical Geography". I also found an intereting one, "New England at a glance: Profiles from 1990 census". I am going to continue to look for other books as I go along in my projects.
April 6, 2005
I changed all my information to HTML, and made a personal page. I am having trouble seeing the source for the guide, so I can not figure out how to connect the personal page to the rest. I am also having trouble connecting an image of a map to the page. I will be asking Dr. Hellstrom when he comes back from his trip.
April 15, 2005
After Dr. Hellstrom got back, he showed me some of the things I was missing. I also got a lot of my HTML tags at the web monkey WebPages. I now have three pages on the web, and I published it as well.
April 9, 2005
I started with the information from the 1900 - 1990 census for New Hampshire, and I found the transfer relatively easy, but definitely very messy. It almost seems that although it would take alot more time, it may be easier to manually type information in, depending on the amount of information.
I went back to the census site to find the information on the FIPS codes, and first I typed in FOPS codes in the search and got alot of random stuff. I did find that FIPS stands for Federal Information Processing Standards code on http://ask.census.gov/cgi-bin/askcensus.cfg/php/enduser/std_adp.php?p_sid=u3j1bOCh&p_lva=&p_faqid=209&p_created=1076100031&p_sp=cF9zcmNoPTEmcF9ncmlkc29ydD0mcF9yb3dfY250PTc0JnBfc2VhcmNoX3RleHQ9IEZJUFMgY29kZXMmcF9wYWdlPTE*&p_li=. I found alot of information about zip codes, and ZCTA's (Zip code tabulation areas) but not alot about the FIPS codes there. So I started to look around the site more. I did a full search on the whole site and found http://www.census.gov/geo/www/fips/fips.html. The first paragraph states:
"Federal information processing standards codes (FIPS codes) are a standardized set of numeric or alphabetic codes issued by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to ensure uniform identification of geographic entities through all federal government agencies. The entities covered include: states and statistically equivalent entities, counties and statistically equivalent entities, named populated and related location entities (such as, places and county subdivisions), and American Indian and Alaska Native areas."
Basically, these code are regulated federally and are used to keep track of all the important information of that particular place. Therefore, it is very important for these codes to be correct, or ARCGIS will not be able to recognise them.
April 18, 2005
I already had a folder on my compact flash drive for ArcGis, so I didn’t have to do that one. My first save of the mxd I named it mystates.mxd, sing I had 4 states. I had no problem getting all 4 of my states to show up on the map, and then I saved the shp files as the state abbreviation_counties. (Example MA_counties.shp) When I was trying the projections, I had a little trouble finding the one that looked right. I tried NA Albers equal area conic, NA equidistant, Lambert, and contiguous. The one that seemed to look the best was state plane Vermont; NAD 1983 state plane Vermont.
When choosing the data’s common column I chose the FIPS code because I knew that both tables had that code and that they would be the same. In the previous lab, I had already joined all the states together in the DBF file so it was relatively easy to join the tables. I saved it as mystates2. At step 9 in the lab, Dr. Hellstrom told me that I could do just one of my states, and I chose to do Massachusetts because if I am going to do planning in MA, it would be good to start to know a bit about my state. I had no problem with the calculations, and part of that may have been because I had no 99999 fields in my table. Overall this lab didn’t give me any problems and it went very smoothly
DBF4 file – is a excel database file that can be joined with ARCGIS
Select by Attributes – you can select a feature in a layer by a certain attribute. (A piece of info that describes a feature on a GIS map)
Query – When you find a feature or attribute by asking a certain question. (What if….)
Fields (in a table) - The vertical column in an attribute table that contains attributes or information about geographic features on a GIS map.
Records (in a table) - A row in a database or attribute table that contains all of the attributes values of a single entity.
Attributes - A piece of information that describes a geographic feature on a GIS map. The
attributes of an earthquake would include the date it occurred, its latitude and
longitude, depth, and magnitude.
Relational Database – A database where data are stored in more than one table, each one containing different types of data. The different tables can be linked so that information from the separate files can be used together.
Join Function – joins the attributes of the two tables, making one big table
Calculate/Field calculator – When you can put in an equation into the calculator and the number that will show up on the attribute table is the result of that equation.
April 30, 2005 - May 7, 2005
The biggest problem I had with this lab is that I was doing work at school and home, and I would lose information and have to do it all over again. I had to do this three times before I figured out that at home my flash drive was the F drive, and at school it was the E drive, and I had to re-route the information. The other thing was that when I saved my info onto my flash drive, for some reason when saving the shape files, it automatically changed it back to saving in ARCGIS. With Dr. Hellstrom’s help, this was fixed.
For the cloropleth maps I chose to have 5 classifications – 0.5, 10.0, 20.0, 40.0, and 60.0. The highest lowest number was 0.508499 ad the highest highest was 58.349998. When looking at the different maps I can see that they are comparable with this classification. I chose to look more closely at the south shore. I noticed that there is a big increase in SE MA, but a big loss in the Cape, while in 1910 – 1920 the gain decreased in Bristol County and changed to a loss in Plymouth County, while the Cape didn’t change much. In 1920 – 1930 there was now a loss in Bristol County, a small gain in Plymouth County, and the first gain in the Cape. In 1930 – 1940 there was a significant increase in the Cape now, with only small gains in Bristol and Plymouth counties. After this for 1940 – 1970 there was increase in all three areas, with the largest in Plymouth County and the Cape. In the 70’s and again in the 80’s there was a decrease in Plymouth County, while the other two stayed relatively the same. For the final decade Plymouth and Bristol stayed the same, and the Cape still had an increase. I can see that the Cape has had a significant increase over the last 30 years or so, while Bristol and Plymouth counties had a good increase and now seemed to have leveled off somewhat. When changing the classifications to quantiles there wasn’t much of a difference with only 14 counties. When I changed it to equal/defined intervals it made it look like nothing happens or there is a loss in every county except Dukes County (Nantucket) where there was an increase. I did have to go back later and fix some of the classifications and exclude some of the numbers that fell outside the highest low number because I lost some of my counties. I chose the colors because the seemed pleasing to the eye yet still distinguishable, but had to change one of the greens to a lighter green because when I printed the map it was too close to the darker green.
I really had no trouble when creating the other maps, except choosing an appropriate symbol for the graduated symbol map so that you cold see what was going on. For the Graduated symbol classification I had 9520 and my low number and 1,465,396 as the high so my classifications included the numbers 9520, 100000, 600000, 1000000, 1500000. For the dot density map I originally chase the dot value to be 5000 but then I changed it to 1500 because there was too much loss. With a number less than that I felt that you couldn’t see the differentiation between the dots. I also chose 3 for the size of the dots because 4 was too big, and I chose a light green background with red dots so that they would be easy to see. I tried to add streets to the maps but couldn’t find them. I was able to add the county names, the legend, and the title with no problems.
I saved all of the exported maps as JPEGs, and then transferred them into my images folder within the HTML folder so that I can try to add them to my web page. When trying to put them into this word document, I had some problems because they are too large, so now I am trying to fix the size of them, and if I cant figure that out then I will just print them to add to a printed out lab log to turn in. I managed to open the maps in Photoshop and change the size to 4 by 5.176 inches to add to my lab log. I then had to edit them a bit more in the word document to make them all fit, and I did the best I could at keeping them all approximately the same size. Here are my maps that I saved:
