Census Data

This page covers the use of the census reporter API to obtain census data: https://github.com/censusreporter/censusreporter

Note that the Census Map page also contains some similar information, but focuses on drawing maps with the resulting data. This page focuses specifically on the API and extracting data from the API.

Overview

Let's start with what we're obtaining from the API and what we need to draw a map.

The census API provides a gateway to census data, which is essentially a very large number of tables of data (the columns), broken down into components and sub-components, for hundreds of thousands of geographical entities (the rows). We can think of each piece of data about a particular location as a cell in a giant spreadsheet.

Both the data and the geographical entities are organized hierarchically. For example, a single table about poverty might have poverty statics broken down by demographics or education level, resulting in several dozen columns. The geographical entities are likewise organized in a hierarchy including the country, states, counties, and census tracts.