Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies and Planning
11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science Laboratory
In-Lab Notes - Lab Exercise 5:
Working with ACS Data & the MIT Geodata Repository
Goal: Create thematic map of PERCENT of WORKERS who DRIVE TO WORK ALONE.
JOIN ME CODE: xxx-xxx-xxx
Issues:
Overview of steps in the lab:
Get the needed files into C:\temp\...
Extract Eastern Mass census block groups in Mass State Plane coordinates
Potential problems with various spatial selection methods
Could you select by attribute?
Find and extract the appropriate ACS variables at the census block group level
Construct your drive-to-work indicator (with appropriate block group identifier)
Join your drive-to-work indicator to the Eastern Mass map
Using ACS data
Today's files are big enough to worry about organizing useful copies in C:\temp
Copy entire directory
M:\data\lab5_ACS_09_13
to a LOCAL drive (e.g., C:\temp)
Start
11188_lab5_ACS_09_13.mxd
from your local copy
Unzip the geodatabase
Do this copying while you are reading the lab as the download will take a while
At end of day, copy entire
C:\temp\lab5_census2k
directory (with saved ArcMap documents) to I:\ or a USB drive
Finding the desired variable
What ACS variable? Using the ACS appendices and table templates
Normalizing counts to compute percents
Where to get data?
ACS products and MOEs
Some data tables are
already
loaded into MS-Access for your convenience!
lab5_ma.mdb
has all the ACS data that you need (except for one table that you will load into the database)
Why MS-Access?
What about a ArcGIS or a spreadsheet program?
Data sources: Census, Social Explorer, the MIT Geodata repository, MassGIS, something else?
Making professional looking maps
The ArcScript for ColorBrewer files
TIGER/Line cartographic boundary files
Dealing with odd ocean/water shapefiles
Guide lines in Design view