Homework 7: Census 2000/2010

As we can see from the map above, the highest concentration of people who identify as Asian is along the West Coast, primarily in Southern California and Northern Washington. I expected to see this, but the high percentage of Asians on the East Coast and in parts of Texas comes as a surprise to me. The distribution ranges from 0.01% to 43.04%.

The legend in the map above tells us that the darkest shade of purple indicates that 49.74% to 86.49% of a county's population consist of people who identify as black. A majority of the counties that fall in this category are in the Southeastern United States, which doesn't surprise me at all. However, I thought that the concentration of blacks in Florida would be higher. The entire distribution ranges from 0.01% to 86.49%.

This map shows the percentage of county populations that consist of some other race. By "some other race", we are referring to people who do not identify as Asian, black, white, American Indian, Alaska Native, Native Hawaiian, or Pacific Islander (according to the Census data). Looking at the map, we can see that most people of "some other race" reside primarily in California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Because of these states' proximity with the Mexican border, it seems reasonable to believe that what is meant by "some other race" is actually "Hispanic." If this is the case, I found it interesting that the Hispanic population in Washington state is relatively dense.

Much of the information presented in this census map series will not come as a surprise to people who have a basic understanding of U.S. history. Although these maps don't really provide additional insight into the distribution of race in the United States, I found this lab to be very helpful. Creating these maps allowed me to work with real Census data as an application of GIS, increasing my familiarity with ArcGIS.

Over the course of the quarter, my overall impressions of GIS changed dramatically. It has always been clear to me that GIS is a powerful and highly informative tool for organizing, presenting, and analyzing spatial data, but when we first started working with ArcGIS, my frustration with the program's learning curve eclipsed my understanding of its usefulness. However, as we did more and more lab assignments, I became more and more comfortable with the program. Now I fully appreciate the versatility of ArcGIS and GIS in general. Anyone can use GIS to present virtually any kind of geographic information as long as the data is available, and while this accessibility has some drawbacks, I think the benefits of GIS far outweigh the cons.