Sunday, August 28, 2011

Viz: New York Times breaks down 2010 census in a variety of ways

Every 10 years the US Census generates a lot of data about America and the people who live there. The New York Times has created a nice tool for visualizing a good chunk of the data:

http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer

The interface utilizes Google Maps to display a simple map of the United States. At different zoom levels the user can view data at different levels. For example when viewing an entire state, you can highlight over an individual county to see details for that county. When you are zoomed in further it will break down the data to an individual census "tract".

The initial map displays racial diversity, but there are about 20 total types of data that can be displayed. While the information is nice, the map does not give an indication of the change between 2000 to 2010 for all graphs, which would be good information to have as well.


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