Lab 3: Downloading GIS Data

Goals and Background

The general purpose of this lab was to become more familiar downloading and using data.  In this lab we focused on primarily population data from the US Census Bureau.  Another goal of this lab was to learn how to join attribute data to a shapefile so that the information could be visually displayed.  Also, there was a general goal of producing a cartographically pleasing map by the end of the exercise.

Methods and procedures

The first step was to download data from the US Census Bureau, the website link was given: http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml 
from there, it was relatively straightforward.  You could use either the advanced or guided search options to look for the specific data that you wanted, and you could additionally download the shapefile of Wisconsin Counties in the same location.

Homepage of American Fact Finder

The data was downloadable as a Zip file, which could then be extracted for you to use.  Once you had the information in ArcMap, the next step was to join the tables.  This was done by right clicking on the shapefile of Wisconsin counties and then clicking on the option "join" and connecting it to your downloaded data.

One problem that I ran into was that the population data was not stored in a number format.  This made it difficult when I was trying to map certain qualities different colors.  To solve this problem, I added a new field to the attribute data, made sure that it was listed as numeric.  Then I was able to copy the list of numbers and then produce the map that I wanted.

I used basically the same steps when I was following the specific data that the lab asked for, as when I got to choose my own data, and because of this the data frames looked very similar.

Results and Reflections

When I completed downloading the data and joining them to the shapefile, I took a few steps to try and make the map look more cartographically pleasing, the result is below.

 

 

As far as the goals of the lab went, I believe that I became much more familiar with the process of downloading data from the internet, as well as how to join together data and ways to visually portray that. 

Sources
US Census Bureau:  http://factfinder2.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml