Lab 2 Report.

Geography 335 GIS Lab 2 Report

Ian Godin

Overview: 

The purpose of this lab was to learn how to gather census data from the internet and map it using ESRI ArcMap. The map was then published to ArcGIS online.

Methods:

The data for the map was collected from the United States Census Bureau using the American FactFinder tool. The data that was used was from 2010 Summary File 1. The data collected for this lab was the population of Wisconsin at the county level and was downloaded in the form of an Excel spreadsheet. This spreadsheet needed to be edited in order to be used in ArcMap. A shapefile of the Wisconsin counties was also downloaded.

In ArcMap, the attribute table for the shapefile was joined to the census data attribute table. This allowed the census data to be mapped as a variable on the shapefile. The data was mapped as a graduated colors map where a darker color represented a higher population. A second data frame was added to the map and the same process was followed for the second map however that data being mapped was the total number of housing units per county.   The final map was then formatted in ArcMap and published to ArcGIS online. 

Results: 

The final map shows two different demographic totals at the county level. The first map shows total population and the second shows the total number of housing units.  A common pattern is that there are higher numbers of housing units and higher population in counties that contain a major city, such as Milwaukee County. This is not always the case, as certain counties in the north woods region of the state have low population but high numbers of housing. This is probably due to individuals who own vacation homes in this part of the state. 

Overall I enjoyed this assignment and feel that the information I learned from it will be very beneficial. In another course the professor told us that employers will want to look for individuals who are able to gather and work with free data from the census bureau. Through the process of this lab I now have a better understanding of the data gathering process and now know how to access a wide variety of data that can be used in my future maps.