The most excellent Tumblr of the Sunlight Foundation
The country is a mosaic of languages.
The Open Data Census is aiming to track the state of open data globally. Learn more about this project at the Open Knowledge Foundation Blog.
How Sitegeist used great design to make census data cool
How can a design firm and a non-profit focusing on government transparency come together and make data look cool? The Sunlight Foundation and designers from IDEO teamed up to create Sitegeist, an app using location-based data to help you understand where you are.
The Census Bureau recently released its 2012 Census of Governments. Apparently there are 89,004 local governments in the United States. As he’s done before, the inestimable Chris Briem put together a word cloud of what those look like, sized by number of employees. Here’s the preview, but you can click through for a large PDF (51 MB) with the full zoom capabilities that just might test your system processing power.
Interactive: Mapping the census
In Virginia, the hispanic population is skyrocketing and the white population is dwindling. In the Maryland suburbs, diversity is growing. These stories and many more come from the census data that is displayed in this map. Use it to reveal your own stories. Type in your city or zip code below to get started.
Would You Be Better Off in a Different City?
Most of us tend to make one of the biggest decisions of our lives – where to live – on vague notions of which city has the most jobs or the best coffee shops or Chinese restaurants. But the cost of living and quality of life varies widely across the country, particularly depending on what you do and which expenses you carry, and chances are you may not be living where economic data suggests you’d be the most comfortable.
Now an app just unveiled this week can calculate all of this for you (we are not suggesting you peruse the Bureau of Labor Statistics on your own). Upwardly Mobile, a new tool from Sunlight Foundation, can take your career information and your spending priorities and figure out where it makes the most sense to be a library archivist with children in daycare and cars to gas up.
After 72 years, the U.S. Census Bureau today released data from its decennial count in 1940. The release includes a fascinating graphic about how Americans have changed over time. Here’s just one section, comparing our workforce:
There’s much more in the graphic: housing, demographics, etc. Check it out.
![CommonCensus Map Project: Revealing Communities of Interest
The CommonCensus Map Project [commoncensus.org] aims to ‘redraw’ the map of the United States based on the input of its citizens, in order to reveal the boundaries people ‘feel’, as opposed to the state and county boundaries drawn by politicians. It relies on the reports of over 60,591 people who volunteered to reveal the names of places with which they identify themselves the most, in addition to their favorite sports team.](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_lol6yfYIf41qhn3smo1_1280.jpg)
CommonCensus Map Project: Revealing Communities of Interest
The CommonCensus Map Project [commoncensus.org] aims to ‘redraw’ the map of the United States based on the input of its citizens, in order to reveal the boundaries people ‘feel’, as opposed to the state and county boundaries drawn by politicians. It relies on the reports of over 60,591 people who volunteered to reveal the names of places with which they identify themselves the most, in addition to their favorite sports team.
When do people get married and divorced?
The United States Census Bureau just released results from the Survey of Income and Program Participation (SIPP) on marriage and divorce. My wife and I just celebrated our four-year anniversary this past weekend, so naturally I had to take a look.
Earlier this year, Visualizing.org and Eyeo made an open call for designers and developers to create an interactive portrait of America by visualizing the 2010 census data. Jan Willem Tulp, a freelance information visualizer based in The Netherlands has recently published his submission for the competition called Ghost Counties. The visualization, developed in Processing, analyzes the numbers of homes and vacant homes in proportion to the population of all counties in the United States of America.
The Center Of America’s Population Moves West
Once a decade the United States Census Bureau marks a point on the nation’s map that it calls the “National Mean Center of Population.” The Census Bureau describes it as “the place where an imaginary, flat, weightless and rigid map of the United States would balance perfectly if all 308,745,538 residents counted in the 2010 Census were of identical weight.”
If anyone were to ask me “Yo Chris, what’s your jam?” I probably wouldn’t immediately say interactive infographics created from publicly available statistical information. And yet, they are almost certainly what I might describe as “my jam.”
The Washington Post put together an amazing map showing population changes between 2000 and 2010.
Cities have longer lifespans than we do, so things have to be measured in decades and sesquicentennials, not months or years. It’s impressive to note the population boom of downtown LA in the past decade.
If you look at the box open for Echo Park (click to enlarge), with whites moving into the area and minorities moving out, you can see that probably Echo Park is in the middle of gentrification, which might last ten or twenty more years as the area becomes safer, hipper, and more prosperous. If you zoom in closer you can note the alarming disparity around the more desirable areas specifically (like around Echo Lake itself).
Of course, all of that is speculative, as the census isn’t perfect and is characteristically less representative of the homeless, the young, the elderly, minorities, and immigrants (legal or otherwise).
The short story is that we mashed together population numbers and geographic shapes using Google Fusion Tables, and then used JavaScript and Fusion Tables’ mapping features to make things pretty and interactive.
The long story is meandering and full of wrong turns. But here are the highlights, should anyone need a little navigation. Don’t hesitate to contact me for more help and insight; I’m due to pay some forward.
