Lesson 3:
Resources
In this lesson we will learn about tools for accessing and redistricting data.
And also discuss some of the resources needed or available to you.
One of the best places to find resources and information on all 5 phases of the Redistricting
Data Program is their website. There you can access the redistricting data files,
technical documentation for how to access these data, and more. Alexandra
will introduce you to several helpful resources on this webpage in Part 2.
As mentioned earlier, the Census realized that providing you with a prototype
of the upcoming 2020 redistricting products
would be helpful to give you a chance to set up your databases in advance and practice with the
data. You can practice with legacy files which use 2018 End-to-End Census Test Prototype data
for Providence County Rhode Island. (By mid-August) By August 16, we are scheduled
to provide the 2020 P.L. 94-171 data files in the legacy format on our public File Transfer
Protocol, or FTP for short. We will soon be covering what the legacy format is in Part 2.
After this course, if you still have questions
about the Redistricting Data Program, contact their office.
We also have the 2020 Census Demographic Data Map Viewer.
This interactive data visualization allows you to see demographic and housing data
down to the tract level for all the redistricting data topics. This map enables you to zoom in and
out of geographies and see population counts and percentages by clicking on a geography.
By September 30, we will provide the states and the public with the same data in data.census.gov,
our centralized place to view data. Different from the File Transfer Protocol
or FTP, data available in data.census.gov will demonstrate data in a table and map
format for viewing and downloading, where the FTP demonstrates data in file format.
More data topics will be periodically released on data.census.gov.
Because there are 4 large files for each state, downloading and storing the redistricting
data files from the FTP site will require computers with sufficient storage capacity.
You will need a software package that has the capability to extract the data from the FTP
site, combining the spatial and tabular data.
There are several options, but R, SAS, and Microsoft Access are a few.
If you like to visualize your data on a map,
you need to download Tiger/line shape files (pop in a definition of shape file) from
census.gov and you can join the shape files with the data in a program such as ArcGIS or Tableau.
Finding data in our other formats through data.census.gov,
data visualizations, and the 2020 Census Demographic Data Map Viewer
will simply require standard internet access through your computer or cell phone.
In this brief lesson you discovered some resources to get more information
on and access redistricting data and learned about the hardware and software you may need.
You have made it through the first section of this course and have all the background information you
need on the 2020 Census, the Redistricting Data Program, and the resources you need to work with
redistricting data! Now we are going to move on to demonstrating how to locate, download,
and work with redistricting data. Alexandra Barker will guide you through this process.