The purpose of this lab was to learn how to download data off the
internet in this case it is from the US Census Bureau. After the data is
downloaded I had to change it into a form that I can work with and map.
The goal is that at the end of the lab I
will know how to download all kinds of data that I may need in the future on a
project. Some of the programs I work with provide a lot of data that I need for
projects but what if they don't have the data I need? That is what this lab is
for, and the data I am looking for is population data about the counties of
Wisconsin. Once I have that data I do the same thing I have done many times
before and make a map of the data.
The first step of the lab is to visit the
US Census website and search for the data I need. Once I find what I am looking
for I download the data as a zipped folder and save it so I can go back into it
when I need to. Once I had it saved I went in and unzipped the folder which
then displays all the data files I downloaded. There are two kinds of data that
are in the folder I worked with the .csv files. This file is not a form that
ArcGIS can understand so I opened the file and saved it as a Excel Workbook
file. This data is just the numbers, but I also need a backdrop to display this
info on so I also need to download a shape file of Wisconsin. I find the data I
need download it unzip it and open the shape file in ArcGIS which gives me a
map of the state of Wisconsin and all its counties, this map however does not
have any of the number data that I am trying to display in it. In order to
display it I need to join the Excel data with this shape file data. When you
join data like this you have to find a field in both data sets that are the
same, in this case that was the GEO_ID field. Once the data is joined I mapped
the data.
The map in green is a map showing the
total population by county in Wisconsin. I went into the properties of the
layer changed the color so it would display in green, I also made the legend
easier to understand by labeling the data and normalizing it as well. For the
background I went and added a base map of the area in black white.
The other map is showing the urban
population of the counties in Wisconsin. Like the other map I changed some of the
properties to make the map look good as well as normalizing and labeling the
data in the legend also used a base map in this map. I downloaded the data from
the same place and followed the above described steps for both maps.
The data in both these maps is based on
population but you can get all kinds of data from the internet that you can map
and display for a report or whatever you may need it for. Knowing how to find
data and obtain it is a very important part of
GIS.
Sources: US Census 2010
.jpg) |
| Lab 2 Map Populations of Wisconsin by County |
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