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About this data

All data is from the U.S. Census Bureau and accessed through NHGIS. Data on race and ethnicity covers the 1980-2010 decennial censuses, and the 2013-2017 American Community Survey. Poverty and education data come from the 1980-2000 decennial censuses, and the 2008-2012 and 2013-2017 American Community Survey.

To create the dots, we looked at the raw numbers for different demographic categories broken up by Census tract, and then placed the dots randomly within that area. Dots do not represent the actual location of an individual, and some are placed in non-residential areas, such as businesses, parks or water.

Race and ethnicity

The Census treats race and ethnicity as separate categories, and considers Hispanic an ethnicity. That means someone could be white and Hispanic or black and Hispanic. Our data uses non-hispanic counts for all racial categories. Other also includes people who marked two or more races.

Poverty

In the data from the 2013-2017 American Community Survey, both the number of people whose income was below the poverty line and the number of people whose income was at or above the poverty line were included in the data. But the data from the 1980-2000 decennial censuses and the 2008-2012 American Community Survey included only the number of people whose income was below the poverty level. We calculated the number at or above the poverty line by subtracting the number of people reported to have an income below the poverty line from the total population.

Education

In this data, “less than 9th grade” represents people whose highest level of education completed is none, nursery school, or first through eighth grade. “High school or some college” includes people whose highest level of education completed is ninth grade, twelfth grade, an associates degree or some college. “College” includes people who finished four years or more of college, obtained a bachelors or graduate degree or got a professional school certificate.

Data: NHGIS. Production by Alexandra Kanik and Emily Zentner