Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Department of Urban Studies and Planning
11.188: Urban Planning and Social Science Laboratory
In-Lab Notes - Lab Exercise 4:
Working with ACS Data & the MIT Geodata Repository
Goal: Create thematic map of PERCENT of WORKERS who DRIVE TO WORK ALONE.
Share Screen: http://mit.webex.com/join/jf
Issues:
Overview of steps in the lab:
Get the needed files into C:\temp\...
Gain experience working with a personal
geodatabase
and with MS-Access
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 (36 MB) to worry about organizing useful copies in C:\temp
Copy entire directory
Q:\data\lab4_ACS_09_13
to a LOCAL drive (e.g., C:\temp)
Start
11188_lab4_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\lab4_
ACS_09_13
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 margin of error estimates)
Some data tables are
already
loaded into MS-Access for your convenience!
lab4_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 ArcGIS or a spreadsheet program?
DEMO During-lab
Open
11188_lab4_ACS_09_13.mxd
Use ArcCatalog to examine geodatabase:
ACS_2013_5YR_BG_25.gdb
Export/import geodatabase files and MS-Access tables
'Select by location' options: finding block groups in certain counties
Construct MS-Access queries - and avoid divide by zero problems
Use MS-Access tables in ArcMap
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