The goal of this lab was to become familiarized with retrieving data from the Internet. There are countless data sets to choose from, so knowing your area of interest, or AOI, is important before downloading your data. The AOI for this lab was the state of Wisconsin at the county level, specifically the populations and a variable of our choice, in my case, the Median Age of each county.
Methodology:
This lab started out at the U.S. Census Bureau's American Fact Finder website http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. Here, we downloaded the Total Population data for WI by county. Next the shapefile was downloaded. Since the files were zipped, they needed to be unzipped so the data could actually be utilized. As the data was a ".csv" file it needed to be converted to an Excel file before the data was brought into ArcMap. This was accomplished by opening up MS Excel and saving the population data as an excel file (.xlsx). Now the data could be brought into ArcMap and added to the data frame. However, the shapefile didn't have any population data yet. To get the shapefile to share the attribute data of the Excel file a 'table join' was performed using the common field of "GeoID." From here it was just a matter of making a cartographically pleasing map by picking an appropriate color ramp, adding a legend, title, etc. This process was repeated with another the Median Age of each county.
Results:
Problems/Obstacles:
I originally wanted to map the age groups and gender of WI. Although there were many categories and it would have been hard to show all of the data. I thought maybe I could throw out the county choropleth map, and instead map the weighted mean center of each age group by gender. However, that wouldn't have fit the parameters of the assignment so I had to download another data set.
