When I saw the NYC ancestry data, I immediately thought, "That screams MAP!"
Brian Lehrer Show producer Jody Avrigan had been working on a great project looking for the new "Littles" in New York City -- neighborhoods where people of a certain ancestry or ethnicity live. He had a spreadsheet; I wanted to visualize it.
The result may be my favorite map project so far:
Mostly, I built on what I'd learned making WNYC's Census Maps, adding a few of things:
• An on-map drop-down menu (here's the CSS code for that).
• Code that selects different data from a single Google Fusion Table.
• Panning and zooming to the neighborhood I want to highlight.
• A better "Share or Embed" pop-up box using jquery.alerts.js.
I also tried to clean up and refactor my original code to make it easier to read (and reuse).
You can see that code on GitHub. I tried to document it clearly, but post a note below if you have any questions or would like clarification.
UPDATE: In making this map, I used a new (to me) trick to remove the water areas from census tract shapes on the coastline. Here's how I did it, if you're interested.