Week 8: Census Maps

The first map I produced examines the distribution of African Americans throughout the United States by county. As the map shows, counties with a significant percentage african american are located primarily in the South, with the exception of isolated counties in the Midwest and North. This distribution is likely due to the historical presence of african americans in the South, first as slaves and later as inhabitants. Another interesting feature of this map is the relatively high concentrations of African Americans in certain counties, above 80% in some places. This is not seen in any other racial group outside of caucasian, neither Asian or “other races” ever reached above 50% concentration. This is a surprising and intriguing aspect of african american population dispersal within the United States.

The next map I made focused of the percentage of people of Asian decent by county in the United States. This map had quite a different distribution than African Americans, with populations primarily concentrated in the west coast, specifically California and Washington, with some outlying counties in urban centers in Texas and the East Coast. This data seems to intuitively make sense, as the west coast is much closer to Asia and immigrants would be likely to come through there. In addition, many immigrants come over to work in high tech industries, which are primarily based in the San Francisco-Bay Area. The fact that the highest proportion of Asians occurs in the South Bay, where silicon valley is located, seems to confirm this.

The final map showed “other race” population. The is population is primarily latino, but due to the phrasing of the census it is referred to as “some other race.” The population is distributed along the West Coast, with its highest concentrations in southern states. This makes sense, as most latino immigrants would be coming from Central and South American and would therefore enter the United States through the southern border. One unique feature of this population distribution is its presence in rural farming areas such as California’s central valley and eastern Washington. This is likely due to the presence of latino immigrants as farm workers in these ares. The one surprising aspect of this map, which I would like to look into more, is the high concentration of this population in central New Mexico, where neither of the populations I examined previously had been.

Overall this census map series was very interesting to produce. While I had some guesses about what the distributions of these populations would be, it was still informative to see the information displayed visually. The census is a very powerful tool due to the sheer volume of data it has. This data makes a wide variety of analyses possible, and GIS’s compatibility with databases makes it simple to create output such as the maps I made. The only adjustment I really had to make was deciding to map based on percentages instead of absolute numbers, to control for the differing population sizes of different counties. These maps are the tip of the information available for analysis from the census, and it is fortunate that the US government makes the data available for free. Overall, my experience with using GIS and census data to create these maps was a very informative and relatively simple one, and I look forward to visualizing and analyzing more data.