Goals and Background
The goal of this lab was to learn how to download data from the U.S. Census Bureau and use that in ArcMap to create an original map.
Work Flow
The first objective was to visit the American Factfinder website that has information from the U.S. Census Bureau. From there, I downloaded 2010 Census data for all the counties in Wisconsin. After downloading that data I had to unzip it. From there I needed to open the excel worksheets that were in the zip file and I needed to save them as excel workbooks rather than what they were saved as originally. After doing so, I opened the files and looked at the data to make sure it all looked good. After that I needed to download the shapefile for the Wisconsin census data. I also did this through the American Factfinder website. After downloading all of this data I viewed it through the attribute tables in ArcMap to make sure it all transferred properly. I mapped it all on ArcMap and then continued to download another dataset for all the counties in Wisconsin. I chose the data for the amount of housing units per county in Wisconsin. After doing so I joined the housing unit information with the original data I had downloaded. In order to make this join permanent I exported to the joined shapefile to a new file. I then created a second map to represent my new data.
Results
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| Figure 1: Lab 2 final product. |
The map above is my final product, with the total population of Wisconsin by county on the left and the amount of housing units in Wisconsin by county on the right. The maps look quite similar because it's obvious to note that if there is a higher population then there will be more housing units and vice versa. Looking at it now I wish I had done a different dataset for the second map so that it would look more different than the first, but I am very satisfied with the result and I came across fewer problems than I did with the first lab. This lab also asked us to upload our map where we chose the data to ArcGIS online. The link for my map is below:
http://uwec.maps.arcgis.com/home/item.html?id=95c04423f6db4faa86bdf68e83873d7b
Sources
