GIS, by its nature is sort of interdisciplinary, and so we have students not only in geography,
but in environmental sciences, in economics, in historic preservation.
And we're teaching how to use the technology in different ways.
And so rather than use sort of the canned data that comes out, I do show them how to
use the raw data, and how the raw data is then developed into data that is more manageable.
So we go through the TIGER files.
I explain TIGER data and why it was created, when it was created.
I give them a little bit of a history there.
My students have to do a final project at the end of the year, and every week, I remind
them that they need to start collecting data.
And I'd say probably 80% of those students use census data to augment the data that they're
working with so they can actually relate this to, you know, the population density, or some
economic factor.
SRLN is designed to connect allied professionals to help improve access to justice and access
to our civil courts, making them more approachable and easier for people to get the resources
they need.
We got to tell the story of the Florida Bar Foundation and how civil legal aid is a crucial
second responder after a natural disaster.
Hurricane Irma swept through Florida, and everybody knows that the first responders
that helps get people food and shelter immediately.
But what civil legal aid does is it helps people rebuild their lives, get their documents
that they need, sign up for benefits, and, you know, put the pieces back together again.
We use the Census Bureau data to help identify the areas that were most legally vulnerable,
meaning those people might not have reached out for help from civil legal aid organizations.
We took each county within Florida, and we used proportionate symbols that show the number
of people that were certain risk factors.
And then we showed each of those risk factors independently so they could start to see the
areas that had the most number of people that needed help.
It's a way to be impartial and just report count.
And then we aggregated all of those things and created a legal vulnerability index so
that the Florida Bar Foundation was able to ensure that they gave grants to the organization
that serves those areas.
Currently I am working on a project with the Fire EMS Department where we are trying to
assess and ultimately reduce fire risks in the community.
I'm gathering data from various sources.
Some things we have in-house, others are from the state.
I'm also getting some census data.
For example, structure size, a larger house means more of a fire risk.
Ages.
Very young children and having elderly people can increase the fire risk.
I'm gathering all of this data, and then ultimately we're going to assign or assess a value, risk
value, to each single family home in the county.
That data will ultimately be used to help determine where to put some more resources.
Venture Philanthropy Partners, or VPP, for short, is a grant-making organization here
in the District of Columbia that predominantly serves youth and young adults throughout the
Greater Washington, D.C. area.
We identify the particular areas, either geographic areas or areas of need, using a variety of
census products, predominantly census data itself, but increasingly the American Community
Survey, the ACS.
For example, if we are really focused on identifying where we can provide the greatest amount of
support and services to little ones, to ages 0 to 2 years old, we have to know where the
largest proportion of those kids are in the community, but also look at additional complementary
data, like how many of those are already in early learning supports and services, and
which are the communities in our attachment area really have a dearth of those services.
Another example of how VPP makes investments using data is really focusing on the composition
of households and what we think a particular intervention might need based on households
at the census tract level or the census block group level.
The census data products really allow us to paint that picture of what's going on in sort
of the community and the neighborhood level so that when we, as a funding entity, support
non-profit providers and community groups in these geographic locations, we can provide
them with assistance.
I was very surprised in school at seeing how much data was accessible to us as students
and to us at researchers.
In my intro to GIS course we used census data to track different racial inequalities in
certain cities and neighborhoods.
We also used census data to track wealth inequalities and disparities between different urban and
suburban areas.
One of my big projects that I did for my spatial analysis course was I tracked the five boroughs
of New York, and I tracked white flight from 2000 to 2010.
And I used census data by looking at white-owned homes in comparison to other minorities and
people of color's homes.
And I tracked them down by income and school to see like if there is a correlation between
if someone was a recent graduate, or if someone was not a recent graduate, if they were a
homeowner, and if that changed over time.
And using census data to track that and manage that and make that stuff navigable is important
and imperative to defining that type of research.
We've been working with census data for a long time, so we’re very accustomed to working
with it.
We work closely with them to understand the formats of the data, how to incorporate it
into our datasets.
And going back 25 years, actually, to the origination of the TIGER data.
And we have a product called U.S. Topo, which is kind of our next generation, U.S. Topographic
Map.
And we also have a variety of different other products, such as the National Map Viewer,
and topographic maps comprise a lot of different data sets, including several that we work
closely with Census Bureau to incorporate into our products.
So we're remapping the United States every three years.
So that's where our relationship with census is critical, because it's very important for
us to keep the data current.
And especially when we're working with transportation data, it changes a lot.
We're also continuing improving those products.
And we've actually been working for the last three years extensively with census to improve
the quality of the transportation data sets.