GIS 1 Lab 2: Downloading GIS Data

GIS 1 Lab 2: Downloading GIS Data

Geography 335

Greg Burgess

Goal

The goal of this lab was to get experience with importing and manipulating data from outside sources, such as the US Census Bureau. Using outside data from reliable sources is useful for expanding the amount of information a map can show. Therefore it is imperative that GIS students learn this skill. Another main goal of this project is to get a basic understanding of table joins. Being able to join tables allows us to further manipulate data. A secondary goal of this lab is to further develop map making skills, as being able to make cartographically pleasing maps from different types of data is a fairly important skill. Being able to make well designed maps is important for any map maker to be proficient at because it allows the map maker to convey large amounts of data in a clean, easy to read manner.

Methods

To accomplish these goals, data needed to be downloaded off of the US Census Bureau website (something that could not be done for a long time because of the government shutdown). Data searches in the US Census Bureau site were specified until population and housing data files of Wisconsin counties were located. For this project, we were looking for SF1 data, which is the basic standard Census data. This data was downloaded, unzipped, and saved as an Excel workbook file. Saving the file in the correct format makes the standalone Excel tables able to be imported into the ArcGis. The data only contains information regarding county populations and housing, and must be joined with a Wisconsin shape file before the data can be plotted as a map.
Once the data was joined, a cartographically pleasing map was made. To make the Wisconsin population and housing data more pertinent, it was normalized to the total population in Wisconsin. This made the data much easier to to read, dividing the counties up by percentage of the state population and percentage of the number of housing units in the state they contained. North arrows, scales, legends, and titles were added, and the layout was edited to create a cartographically pleasing map.

Results

The result of the joining of the US Census Bureau data with the Wisconsin shape files is two maps depicting Wisconsin county population and Wisconsin county housing data (Image 1). Note that the county population (shown by the map on the left) generally dictates the percentage of housing units that will be present in each county (shown in the map on the right), although there are some slight discrepancies in areas. Because of this, the shading in the two maps generally mirror each other.

Image 1- A map of the percentages of Wisconsin population in each county (left) and a map of the percentages of Wisconsin housing units in each county (right).

 

Source

US Census Bureau

Map Created by Greg Burgess