Introduction to Working with U.S. Census Data in Python
The United States Census Bureau
publishes over 1,300 data sets via its APIs. These are useful across a myriad of
fields including data journalism, allocation of public and private resources,
data activism, marketing and strategic planning across many sectors.
In this tutorial, which is targeted at
both beginners and those with some experience with census data, we will
demonstrate how open-source Python tools can be used to discover, download,
analyze, and generate maps of U.S. Census data.
This tutorial will consider the full breadth and richness of data available
from the U.S. Census. We will cover not only American Community
Survey (ACS) and similarly well-known data sets, but also a number of data
sets that are less well-know but nonetheless useful in a variety of research
contexts.
Through a series of hands-on demonstrations, attendees will learn to
- discover data sets, some with a handful of variables and others
with tens of thousands;
- download demographic and economic indicators at levels ranging from the entire
nation to individual neighborhoods;
- plot the data we downloaded on maps;
All Python tooling used in the workshop is available as open-source
software. Final versions of the notebooks used in the tutorial will also
be made available via open-source.