I can haz demographic displays, plz?

June 7, 2009 6:09 PM

I am in need of a program that will allow me to display demographic information by county on a state map. Recommendations?

I am interning for the Legal Aid society over the summer, and part of my work includes compiling demographic statistics about their client population and figuring out a way to display it in a way that ties in with a map of our area (Tennessee.) I am looking for a program set up for this, and that will allow me to create some quite sophisticated displays-- for instance, percentage of total population vs. percentage of clients per county, dominant type of cases per county, etc.

Legal Aid is fairly well-funded, but we are still a non-profit; we are willing to make a cash commitment but don't have a whole lot of money to throw around, so cheaper/free is better! Thank you from a lowly intern!

posted by WidgetAlley to computers & internet (8 comments total)

This is what ArcGIS was made for. It is expensive, but maybe ESRI has a program for cheaper copies for non-profits.
posted by schyler523 at 6:21 PM on June 7

This online GIS application utilizing Google Earth may help you.
posted by schyler523 at 6:32 PM on June 7

schyler523 is right, ArcGIS does exactly what you are looking for, it does cost a lot though. Here is as link to a list of free open source GIS programs.
posted by Morgangr at 6:36 PM on June 7

Get Processing and a copy of this book.
posted by signal at 11:04 PM on June 7

Quantum GIS is a good (free!) alternative to ArcGIS for simple projects like this.

If you are close to a college or university with a Geography/GIS department, you may want to contact them and see if any students are interested in a real world project.
posted by look busy at 6:29 AM on June 8

Maybe try the Tennessee Electronic Atlas? It includes software to convert census data to KML, which can then be used in Google Earth or ArcExplorer (both free).
posted by motherly corn at 9:52 AM on June 8

- gotta disagree with signal, map rendering and storage is nontrivial. you don't want to reimplement it.

This is pretty much what I do.

Quantum GIS is a great tool. It renders a little more slowly than uDIG, but it's very solid and people are finally centralizing on it.

I'd really avoid ArcGIS, it's a money-sink and cludgy old software.

As far as data, look into the TIGER/Line shapefiles - you could easily download them for your state. Then you can join them with your data (as long as its in CSV, etc) in qGIS (Quantum GIS = qGIS). Then look into layer properties - symbology and you should find some options as far as display.

Doing math on the attributes you have already thrown out, you'll be creating new fields for each feature and calculating the values.
posted by tmcw at 11:15 AM on June 8

Also, check out Social Explorer, which is kind of an online mapper packaged with census data. Its not a full blown GIS, but it's a lot cheaper than ArcGIS. There is a scaled-down free version.
posted by motherly corn at 12:53 PM on June 8