Lab1_Blog

Rajiv K. Rao

GEOG 353: GIS & Visualization

Professor John B. Krygier

August 31, 2009

Sine my home country is India, I had a quick thought about mapping a state from back home. At the same time I realized that getting mappable data for states back home might be very difficult as the government statistical department is not well facilitated and to keep a count of 1.4 billion people roughly especially when you are not that well equipped with surveys and technology can be really hard. There are few statistical sites about the population and population growth within the states.

Indian Census Site – was a horrible site and I am pretty ashamed when I see almost most of the links in this site were broken. I typed in ‘India Census’ in Google and the census site of the Indian government showed up in the search result. I tried to get some data from this site and almost all the links were bad. I have very little idea where to get population data state wise when the most basic data cannot be supplied by the government.

Indian Census source – this site looked kind of spurious and unreliable. Though there was the population data for the year 2001 but getting decennial data from this site looked kind of unlikely. This site also had statistics on sex ratio, population density, population density and literacy but this data was not substantial for the assignment.

I did surf a lot other sites but I realized that I should leave my endeavors of finding basic population data of India at this point especially when all the government links failed. I decided to find population data for Florida and Georgia.

U.S. Census – I went to the U.S. Census Bureau site to find population data on Florida and Georgia. On the site I recognized that we could search population data state wise which was very useful. I did have to search around before I got to what exactly I was looking for. In my search I realized there were quite old records of population data that we could find. One of the links led me to a page where I could find statistics on population back in the 1800s. It was rather amusing to see such readily available data. I was actually able to find the data under the ‘PEOPLE’ link under Basic Counts/Population. This link led to page where there was an agglomeration of links on historical population data which made things much simpler. Though I could find the population data by counties for the state of Florida and Georgia from the year 1900-1990, for the rest of the data I had to try other links. The following links helped me to get the data that I acquired:-

Selected Historical Decennial Census Population and Housing Counts

County Population Census Counts 1900-90

FLORIDA:
Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990

GEORGIA:
Population of Counties by Decennial Census: 1900 to 1990

For estimates of population in 2000 and thereon for the states of Florida and Georgia, I decided to follow the links below:-

Population of Florida from 2000-2008

Population of Georgia from 2000-2008

Information on population Changes:-

1. Georgia’s Dilemma of Population Growth
2. Resident Population of States in the United States, 1900-2000
3. Florida population Growth:Past, Present and Future
4. Georgia population projections 2015
5. State Population Estimates and Demographic Components of Population Change

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