Making Census data sing

The Riverside page for California Census dataDallasnews.com reacted quickly to the release of fresh Census population data on Tuesday, launching a simple but powerful database app that allows people to enter a specific address and get population data in their neighborhood.

The data is sorted by Census tract but mapped to the block level, so it's easy to see changes and population mixes within your area of interest.

DallasNews, a Belo property, made the app available to its sister site at the Riverside Press-Enterprise, which dumped in California data, and from which I pulled these examples for Bakersfield.

Top-level Census data for BakersfieldThe maps and charts here show changes in Bakersfield metro and the area around The Bakersfield Californian offices in downtown Bakersfield. Because some variables are fielded, it's easy to quickly view data by county, city and congressional district. 

Daniel Lathrop created the app and Ryan McNeill added the data sorting and analysis, programming in Rails, Census data sorted by specific address, in this case The Bakersfield Californian's downtown officesand integrating PostGIS, SQL Server queries and Google Charts for the mapped interface. McNeill said in a post on a Knight Digital Media Center listserv that, knowing the Census data was coming, he wrote the SQL queries in advance to speed launch of the app.

"Essentially I loaded in Louisiana data in advance, wrote out all the queries to pull out race, ethnicity and housing data for blocks, block groups, tracts, places, counties and congressional districts," McNeill wrote. "Then when the Texas data was released, we just poured it in." 

Smart, smart, smart.

Database reporting is often considered intimidating and time intensive, but this is a great example of jumping on data and turning around a simple but elegant and easy-to-use solution that has legs.