Lab #7: Census 2000

For this lab I created three maps based on the 2000 United States census. Each map shows the distribution of a specific race across all the major counties in the United States. The first map gives the percentage of Black Americans in each county. By trying out different distributions for the coloring scheme I was able to get a nice, even spread over the country. Notice however that the darkest color (dark blue in this case) covers a large percentage interval relative to the other colors. This happens because the distribution tried to spread each color over an equal number of counties. From the map we see that the black population is more dense in the south east part of the United States and least dense in the northern areas, especially in the central regions.

The second map shows the Asian American population percentages for each county in the United States. The distribution is more evenly spread than the black population, but seems to have higher percentages around the coastal regions of the country. Note that the color gradient was accidentally reversed for this map so that darker colors represent lower percentages and lighter colors represent higher percentages. It is conventional to use dark colors for higher values and light color for low values.

The third map simply shows the percentage of other races alone according to the 2000 census. This distribution does not include large races like Caucasian or Hispanic. We see that the percentages are much higher on the western areas of the United States, especially in southern states like Texas. A variety of minority races was used to create this distribution.

Mapping the 2000 census statistics provided useful maps for understanding how certain races tend to live in specific areas of the United States. There are a variety of potential reasons for this and GIS can help support theories that geographers might be exploring. There are also trade-offs when making these maps. One of the most significant trade-offs dealt with the percentage intervals for the color mapping. To make the map appear most evenly distributed it was necessary to map the regions with uneven intervals. Specifically the darkest color usually had a relatively large interval compared to the other colors. This makes the map less informative and biases the information. If the intervals were evenly spread, the aesthetics of the maps would then be hurt. In this way, a good geographic researcher must decide on how to balance useful information with map aesthetics.