I'm one of the developers. This site is all about making public data about places more accessible. We have pages all the way from the national level all the way down to individual city blocks, and everything in between.
The data itself is mostly demographics: age, sex, race & ethnicity, income, employment, and education. We separate by entity and by topic and each page has sections for the stats within the entity, comparisons of child entities, and comparisons of the entity with peer entities.
Everything is extensively cross-linked, both in the maps, and in navigational lists.
The data came primarily from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, and the 2010 Census.
This is really great. I was pleasantly surprised to see that there was information available about household income at the "tract" level. I had searched some months ago for a data set that exposed high resolution income/poverty statistics at this resolution for Chicago, but could never find much beyond neighborhoods, or as anonymized sets. But I wasn't until now aware of the firehouse that is http://factfinder.census.gov/.
I assume the lack of an API for automating calls to your wonderfully structured data is to comply with the TOS of the census.gov site. Or is this for some other reason?
Is this data from the 2010 census, or is this updated to reflect 2015 estimates? (Is the number of 0–4 or 25–29 year olds listed the number that there were in 2010, etc.)
It would be nice if next to each chart (or at least somewhere on each page) there were a more explicit description of the precise data source.
Is there any way in this tool to explore past demographic data, e.g. from 2000 or 1980?
The about page talks a bit about the sources. Everything comes from the latest 5-year American Community Survey (ACS), which is part of the Census Bureau's data collection. Data from that survey is in some sense an average over the years of the survey. They use that wide a window to get the error bars down on the various metrics.
The exception is the city block level data. The ACS does not publish on the block level, so we fall back on the 2010 census. This is why the individual blocks have way less data.
Neighborhood shapes are from Zillow (link in the site footer on pages with neighborhoods), the city block shapes come from the Census. They have shapefiles for all their geographical entities (state, county, tract, block group, block)
[+] [-] jrd79|11 years ago|reply
The data itself is mostly demographics: age, sex, race & ethnicity, income, employment, and education. We separate by entity and by topic and each page has sections for the stats within the entity, comparisons of child entities, and comparisons of the entity with peer entities.
Everything is extensively cross-linked, both in the maps, and in navigational lists.
The data came primarily from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey, and the 2010 Census.
[+] [-] gajomi|11 years ago|reply
I assume the lack of an API for automating calls to your wonderfully structured data is to comply with the TOS of the census.gov site. Or is this for some other reason?
[+] [-] aw3c2|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobolus|11 years ago|reply
It would be nice if next to each chart (or at least somewhere on each page) there were a more explicit description of the precise data source.
Is there any way in this tool to explore past demographic data, e.g. from 2000 or 1980?
[+] [-] jrd79|11 years ago|reply
The exception is the city block level data. The ACS does not publish on the block level, so we fall back on the 2010 census. This is why the individual blocks have way less data.
No, we don't have past data.
[+] [-] nhofmeister|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chitza|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taksintik|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hackthisaccount|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrd79|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dieg0|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacobn|11 years ago|reply
(I'm one of the devs)
[+] [-] etep|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jrd79|11 years ago|reply
[+] [-] etep|11 years ago|reply