More Dot Density Maps

By popular demand, I’m attaching dot density maps for more Virginia cities plus a new statewide map…enjoy:

• Virginia 2010

• Fredericksburg City 2010
• Richmond-Pertersburg Metro Area 2010
• Martinsville 2010
• Lynchburg City 2010
• Harrisonburg City 2010
• Staunton-Waynesboro 2010
• Roanoke-Salem 2010

Plus the ones from the previous post:

• Northern Virginia 2010
• Charlottesville City 2010
• Winchester City 2010
• Hampton Roads 2010

One dot, one person: population density maps for Virginia cities

For the new, interactive, Racial Dot Map project visit HERE.

Our recent post on dot density mapping of U.S., Canadian, and Mexico census data by MIT’s Media Lab got a lot of attention…so we decided to give it a try ourselves, taking a deeper look into census data for Virginia’s major urban centers and smaller cities. All of the dots on the following maps represent one person, as enumerated by the 2010 Census, with a little bit of a twist.  Rather than giving everyone a black dot, as MIT’s Media Lab did, we added another layer of data by assigning color dots based on race and ethnicity.  The results are quite illuminating…

Animating historical county boundaries and census data

Among those of us who love old maps, the good people at the Atlas of Historical County Boundaries project have digitized and uploaded historical information on the shape of American counties.  With this data one can animate how America’s political boundaries have changed since the founding of the Massachusetts Bay and Virginia Colonies.  The above video shows historic county boundaries from 1630 to 1910 (shortly after Oklahoma and Indian Territory joined to form the State of Oklahoma in 1907).  Please note these boundaries show the creation of government-defined geographic units, not necessarily where population is located.

Another great thing about this data is the level of detail available.  For instance, focusing on the monumental changes that Virginia has gone through is quite interesting:

Note the emergence of many of Virginia’s Independent Cities at the turn of the 20th Century.

Things get more interesting when these county files are merged with historical census data.  Inspired by our previous post on “Every person gets a dot,” I decided to look at county population dot densities from the first United States Census of 1790 to the recent 2010 Census.  Here, every dot represents 5,000 people:

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Dustin Cable is a Policy Associate at the University of Virginia’s Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service where he conducts research on topics that lie at the intersection of demographics, politics, and public policy.