2010 Census Atlas Available Online

Do It Yourself Cartography:  2010 Census Atlas Available Online

The Superintendent of the Census, Francis Amasa Walker, published the first statistical atlas of the United States census from 1870.  The atlas, Statistical Atlas of the United States, was published in 1874 and includes population, social, industrial, and vital statistics and maps.  The U.S. Census Bureau continued to publish the atlases through the 1920 census and then again in 2007 using data from the 2000 census with the Census Atlas of the United States.  But an atlas of the 2010 census was never published due to budget cuts.

Nathan Yau, Doctor of Statistics from UCLA, author of three books on statistics and data, and publisher of the FlowingData Blog seized the opportunity to create a new version of the popular statistical atlas.  Yau decided to create a new atlas based on data from the 2010 census, but he created the atlas in an artistic format similar to the atlas from 1874.  The result is the Statistical Atlas of theUnited States Based on the Results of 21st Century Government Analyses.  Yau produced maps depicting geology, weather, taxation statistics, transportation, education, and population statistics—age, foreign population, predominant gender, and race.

The 2007 Census Atlas of the United States is available in the Ball State University Libraries’ GIS Research and Map Collection (GRMC) on the second floor of Bracken Library.