-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Social Explorer historical GIS
Date: Mon, 16 Oct 2006 17:42:58 -0600
From: Sam Otterstrom <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: MAPS-L
To:
From: Andrew A Beveridge [mailto:[log in to unmask]]
Date sent: 12 Oct 2006
Forwarded by: Matthew Gilmore [[log in to unmask]]
x-post H-Demog
Social Explorer (www.socialexplorer.com ) provides easy access to
historical census data for the United States through the use of
interactive maps and reports. Today, we are excited to announce the
preview release of Social Explorer and the addition of seventy years of
census data from 1940 to 2000.
Developed at Queens College CUNY, Social Explorer allows users to
visually analyze and understand the demography of any part of the United
States with access to the following:
Interactive thematic maps of historical census data
Customized reports for any chosen area or areas (including
aggregates)
Complete coverage of the United States, down to neighborhoods and
streets
Simple navigation buttons and a find tool make it easy and
efficient to study neighborhoods
What's New:
1. Seventy years of census data: 1940, 1950, 1960, 1970,
1980, 1990 and
2000 at the neighborhood (census tract), county, state and national
levels, now easily accessible in the form of interactive data maps and
reports.
(click here
<http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/maps/home.aspx> )
2. An animated training guide with step by step
instructions. (click
here <http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/help/home.aspx> )
3. A Reports section, similar in operation to the Census
Bureau's
American Fact Finder, allows users to directly generate reports about
areas of their choice. (click here
<http://www.socialexplorer.com/pub/reports/home.aspx> )
4. A Find tool, allowing users to instantly locate
cities, zip codes,
addresses, counties, towns, townships and other census geographies on
the map.
5. Full source disclosure for all reports - every
variable in a report
links directly to information about where the data originated and how it
was computed, as well as
6. Detailed information for 1960, 1970 and 1980 censuses
about which
variables were not disclosed for privacy concerns.
Guided by feedback from our numerous beta testers, this release is
focused on maximizing Social Explorer's ease of use and eliminating
barriers to demographic research. To this end, we have done extensive
data processing and entry to make Social Explorer possible. For example,
it took over 5 trillion CPU operations just to recode suppressions in
1970 to enable aggregations of the variables. These sort of Herculean
data operations, an unavoidable part of Census research, are already
done by Social Explorer, allowing users to focus on the results they
seek.
Social Explorer is continually improving; we are currently working on
adding data back to 1790 for counties and back to 1910 for census
tracts. A set of data that will make it possible to follow change in the
same area using comparable variables will soon be added. Data from the
2005 American Community Survey, a Census Bureau survey that will
ultimately replace the Census Long Form, will be available in the next
several weeks. We are also working on improving our reporting system,
generating more tools for data mining, and creating sets of data that
are comparable across time. In addition, we plan to develop estimates
and projections of Census data at the small area level.
The developers are grateful to the National Science Foundation, which
funded the development of Social Explorer, as well as the NHGIS team at
the University of Minnesota (www.nhgis.org). Social Explorer is used by
The New York Times, for their newsroom, and the Times funded early data
development and analyses of the Census data for stories in the
newspaper.
Contact: Ahmed Lacevic at [log in to unmask], Andrew Beveridge
at [log in to unmask], or Jordan Segall at
[log in to unmask]
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