Hands-on Redistricting

One of many redistricting experiments we're working on looks at the effort by some community groups to carve out districts particular to their community.

So we gave it a whirl.

There are many ways to wrestle with this data -- and there is much wrestling yet to come. But by ranking and repeatedly mapping the Asian populations by census tract, we were able to come up with some maps that actually satisfy some of the contraints (except for the one that says you can't draw a district based on race!) For more info, click the "Deeper Data Details" link.

WNYC's Colby Hamilton inspired this map, and has a great post to go with it.

Mostly I worked in Google Spreadsheets and Google Fusion tables, using data from the great census.ire.org site.

I had hoped to create a single shapefile of my new district, but joining all of those census tracts kept choking my computer (and QGIS). So you're actually seeing a bunch of tracts without borders. I did use QGIS to rework some of the shapes so they cross two parks -- allowing me to make a contiguous district.

UPDATE: Here is the list of census tracts I used. And if you're poking around in the code, don't rely on the data in the experiment's fusion table; I mucked with it a lot.The original, intact tract data is here. And the Congressional district map of New York is valid for the 111th Congress.

Random thing I learned: Did you know QGIS can export shapefiles into KML? I didn't. Not used here, but good to know.

2 responses
This. Is. It. I knew it at ONA and I know it more every time I check your blog. I'm starting my own experiments here in Seattle. If there's a brainstorming session, I want to be there. If you hold an event like the one I attended in Miami, I want to be there.
Thanks, Carolyn! I'll let you know if such a thing happens again. In the meantime, my recommendation would be to attend IRE's Computer Assisted Reporting conference in St. Louis this February!

Info at: http://www.ire.org/training/conference/CAR12/