Lab 7

This map shows clearly the distribution of Black population in the US by county. It is very evident that there are a lot of black concentrated counties in the South compared to the rest of the country. There are counties with less than 1 percent reported black population that there is no data available (represented by white). The history of the black population in United States is reflected in current day’s population distribution.

The percentage of Asian population by county is shown in the map. Even the most concentrated counties have less than 50% of the population identified as Asian. Because the West coast is closer to Asia through the Pacific Ocean, it is logical that many of them settled on the West coast such as California and Washington. Especially because of the shorter history of immigration compared to other races, the spread of the Asian population into the rest of the continental US is low, with the exception of couple major cities such as New York.

The Other Races population percentage map shows the races not classified as follows: "White", "Black or African American", "American Indian and Alaska Native", "Asian" and "Native Hawaiian and Other Pacific Islander". From the look of the distribution, an educated guess can be made that this mostly consists of Hispanic population in the United States. Many of the counties near the US/Mexico border have higher percentage of “other races” while counties further North have lower percentages. Again, with the exception of major places such as Tristate area and Florida, the rest of the continental US has low spread of the ‘other races’ population.

The census map series and the experience with ArcGIS have been very beneficial. It was very interesting to visualize the data that I grabbed from an outside source, convert it into tables, joining them with the shape data in order to make meaning out of the data. The maps I created clearly show the distribution of population for specific races. From that, I could make inferences and search for the reason behind that, connecting it back to history. I think this lab was very useful in practicing working with data tables and analyzing the data in a different way that I could not do with just an excel file. It really showed the power of GIS that was not allowed without the geographic data.