Your assignment is to use the U.S. Census data in NHGIS. Follow this process.
- Pick a set of census data that interests you, and download it from the NHGIS. You could choose to do a comparison over time, or across variables, or in some other historically interesting way. You may use either state or county data, though generally the higher resolution the data the more interesting it is.
- Simplify the shapefiles using Mapshaper.
- Explore the data. Use the codebooks to understand the variables' meaning. You will doubtless need to transform the data and normalize it by area or population. Exploration will likely include visualization.
- Make maps of the data. They can be either interactive (with leaflet) or static (with ggplot2).
You should turn in a brief essay that includes a minimum of two maps (interactive or static) and one visualization and approximately 500 words of prose. The prose, maps, and visualization should combine to make some historically meaningful interpretation using the census data. Your maps and visualizations should be of presentation quality. Include the code blocks, which should contain only the code necessary to generate the figures. Turn in the link to your HTML file and the link to your GitHub repository.
This repository contains sample code and data.