Lab 2

From Census to GIS Online

By: Joey Mandelko

            The goal of Lab 2 was to create a map from census data. With the ability to make a map out of data found online it is possible to map and query a large variety of information that is already at the disposal of the public. In order to complete this lab, I had to choose a set of data to display using the census data I had available to me from the state of Wisconsin, to create a map and publish it on ArcGIS Online.

 I chose the data file average household size and downloaded the excel file containing the information. After unzipping the file it was possible to open it and save it as an excel workbook file, this applied for both the metadata and tabular data. I then removed the second row of data so it fit with the data processing standards in Arcmap and was able to find the folder in ArcCatalog. Next I joined the data file with the shapefile of Wisconsin and downloaded the shapefile. Once the data was joined with the shapefile I was able to map the average household size by county and format it into a map. At that point I removed any extraneous layers and made a description and labels for my map and posted it online in the Arcgis Online forum for UW-Eau Claire. In that display it is possible to click on each county and a box appears showing the name of the county and the dataset, in this case household size, underneath the name of the county. When comparing the map of household size and population one thing is very clear, the largest centers of population do not have the largest average number of people in each home. The largest households are in a few of the northern counties and several in the rural farming areas where the counties containing population centers like Milwaukee, Madison, Green Bay, and Eau Claire tended to have smaller sized households. Based off of previous knowledge of the state it was very interesting to correlate a connection between the Amish faming centers and the larger household sizes contained in the county. This would be a very interesting variable to map in more detail to discover if there really was a connection between the two.

Any further potential mapping could be done using the same source, which was the United States Census Fact Finder. Both sets of data, for household and population, were from the 2010 Wisconsin census.