Population aged 65 & up, in Ohio (by number).

Population aged 18 to 29, in Ohio (by number).

The ArcGIS software is certainly an interesting tool. It is extremely useful for grouping and presenting data in the form of a map. One of the things I found more interesting was the way it handles layers. Another thing I found interesting, or at least fun to play with, was the ability to mess around with different map projections. As can be seen from my world map, I played around with the projection for quite a while before settling on one which was less well known.

Definitions:

• Map Document (.mxd) – The default document type used by ESRI’s ArcGIS. Contains layers used to display information stored in attribute tables.
• Table of Contents – The window on the left side of ArcGIS which contains the layers and data frames of the Map Document.
• Data Frame – A specific grouping of layers contained in the TOC.
• Map Layer – A
• Attribute Table – A table of information contained in data files. Examples of this information include population, county names, names of major roads, etc.

Initially I thought of ArcGIS as a slightly esoteric program used solely by academics, though after interacting with this program for a while I am starting to see some of its merits. After some introductory information as to how ArcGIS is organized, it is very easy to get it to show the information you require. Though it would be a daunting task to map out tons of data (and multiple maps would probably be used anyway…) for relatively simple things, such as the maps above, ArcGIS is very user friendly.

As for the ESRI website… it was flashy, well organized and professional. (Read: expensive.) After a little bit of cruising, I found a couple of things which piqued my interest. Particularly, this article, which talks of the integration of ESRI’s software with New Zealand’s Animal Health Board (AHB) in order to track practices for controlling bovine tuberculosis. Another interesting article that I stumbled upon was this one. It talks of how Tacoma Community College (TCC) uses ESRI’s software to map where their students live in order to better understand the demographics which they serve. This allows TCC to expand effectively in new markets, increasing enrollment and revenue.

dBase – A database file format originally developed in the 1970s at JPL to help win an office football pool.

Select by attributes – A function which allows the user to select areas on the map which correlate to certain data. Entering a county name, for example, will select all those counties which have that value in a specified field.

Query – In general, the word query is a synonym for the word question. In our particular case, the term query refers to information entered which will be used in turn to return some piece of information.

Fields (in a table) – Fields are groups of information presented in the attributes table. Fields are similar to attributes, however, an attribute is a value contained in a field, whereas a field acts as the header, if you will, of the attributes.

Records (in a table) – TBA

Attributes – A table which lists certain features of the maps. Attributes may be things such as population, FIPS codes, or county name.

Relational Database – TBA

Join (function) -Allows the addition of data from multiple database files to be joined together in the attributes table.

Monitor Fire – A very, very bad thing.

Field Calculate – A function which allows the user to calculate a list of data for a field, from other fields of data (such as population change).

Interestingly enough, though we are still using FIPS codes (Federal Information Processing Standard) they have been deemed obsolete by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST). FIPS codes have since been superseded by an ANSI (American National Standards Institute) standard, INCITS 31:200x. Good luck with the ANSI website, however. Most of this is pretty irrelevant anyway, as the codes themselves (such as 37 for the state of North Carolina) haven’t actually changed.

Edit: I guess it would be good to include a link to the site where I’m referencing most of my html code from. Well here it is, and here’s the page I use most often.

Yahoo! Directory Search: Searching for population data using Yahoo!’s Directory Search was a little frustrating at first. In an age where the keyword search is ‘king’ I found myself momentarily confused by what Yahoo! was showing me. After some cruising around, however, I found my way to the U.S. Census Bureau website. Unfortunately, there is no quick and easy way to access historical data directly from the main page (although this may be a bit of laziness seeping out of me). After a quick keyword search, all kinds of historical data was found and downloaded for North Carolina.

Link.

For the keyword search I chose to use multiple search engines, in order to compare the two. I used Google (by far the most widely used search engine) and Bing, Microsoft’s attempt at a search engine. Very quickly I noticed that Bing gave seemingly random results. Although the results did in fact have the keywords I was looking for (historical population data north carolina) they did not appear to have what I was asking for. After a quick hop over to Google, I found the information I needed (population data for NC from 1790-1990 by race) in the very first search result. This first result was, in fact, a hit from the U.S. Census Bureau’s own page, giving credibility to the data as well as being clear on the allowable usage of said data. An interesting note on the Bing results, not a single link out of the first ten pointed to the U.S. Census Bureau’s website while two of the first ten results from Google did.

Data Collected:
CO-EST2007-01-37.xls (renamed-NCpop2007county.xls)

GCTRTFPresentationDownload.rtf (renamed-NCpop2000county.rtf)

nc190090.txt (renamed-NCpop190090county.txt)

Copyright laws:
Most of the information found on the Census Bureau’s website about copyright laws had to deal directly with the data collected from individuals. It would appear that the data posted on the internet is freely useable.

Historical sources:

Here, here, here and here.