Hi, Chris -

Does the graduate student have something definitive in hardcopy about
population or about the political boundaries.

Why I ask is that I wound up in 1972 having to use a line following
digitizer build Metro area maps for Seattle and Atlanta at their 1970
Census of Population status and also to digitize both areas' electoral
precincts as they were when each of the two cities voted on whether or not
to have a bond issue to pay the local portion of funding to build a rapid
rail system.  Seattle turned theirs down twice and Atlanta turned theirs
down the first time but passed it the second time.  If you've been in
Atlanta in the past 35+ years, you'll note that MARTA in Atlanta has been
running since the 1970s while Seattle finally started building theirs only
between 5 and 10 years ago as of today and started with moving traffic out
of SEA-TAC instead of out of downtown.

If he's able to put something together to be able to digitize the maps
himself, I'd also suggest that he contribute a set of the data files for
the time periods he's interested in so that the next guy (and his
librarian) don't have to go through this process.

If it would help, I believe I still have a copy of the instructions I
worked out for the people that helped me do the digitizing.

The worst problem I had was figuring out the basis for the outlines of the
maps.  Mainly this was because I was limited in the size of the matrix I
could use to do the statistical analyses to figure out what I was looking
at socio-economically.  I finally wound up using census tracts of which
each city had about 250 and aggregating the precincts to the corresponding
census tracts.

So, I wound up with digital files that I used to build the maps which I
printed out on a Calcomp  plotter and then shaded as choropleth maps on
ruby lith.  The whole thing was tedious, but they looked great in the copy
I turned in!

Hope this helps.

virginia
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Virginia R. Hetrick, here in sunny California
Email:  [log in to unmask]
"There is always hope."
My fave:  http://www.washington.edu/cambots/camera1_l.jpg
There's no place like:  34N 8' 25.40", 117W 58' 5.36"
if you can't be at:  48N 7' 4.54" 122W 45' 50.95"
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