Exposing Urban America Through Census Dot Maps

While the Census itself is no longer news, new ways to visualize our population continue. Brandon Martin-Anderson?s Census Dotmap is a nationwide interactive map that displays 308,450,225 dots, one for each person counted by the 2010 Census. Following are several images of Jacksonville and various cities across the country at the same scale.

About Census Dotmap


Jacksonville and Northern Clay and St. Johns Counties.

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What's all this?

This is a map of every person counted by the 2010 US Census. The map has 308,450,225 dots - one for each person.

Why?

I wanted an image of human settlement patterns unmediated by proxies like city boundaries, arterial roads, state lines, &c. Also, it was an interesting challenge.

Who is responsible for this?

The US Census, mostly. I made the map. I'm Brandon Martin-Anderson. Kieran Huggins came to the rescue with spare server capacity and technical advice after this got Boing Boing'd.

How?

I wrote a Python script to generate points from US Census block-level counts, and then generated the tiles with Processing. Here's more detail for the interested.

The census actually counted 308,745,538 people.

Yeah, I don't know. Puerto Rico? The military?

I don't see dots. I see smudges.

The dots are very small. Try zooming in.

Nobody lives in Central Park/Pier 12/County Lockup/Abandoned Themepark.

The 2010 Census reported that someone lived there.

for more information: https://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html




Jacksonville






Atlanta




Birmingham




Boston




Charleston




Charlotte




Chicago




Denver




Detroit




Houston




Indianapolis




Los Angeles




Louisville




Miami




Nashville




New Orleans




New York City




Norfolk




Orlando




Philadelphia




Portland




Richmond




Salt Lake City





San Francisco




Savannah




St. Petersburg




Tampa




Article by Ennis Davis