Mapping the Census: An Introduction (Report‪)‬

Maps have played a central role in the history of censuses in the United States and around the world. Maps serve as a platform for a variety of census-related tasks. As a basic tool, maps are used by census agencies to create enumeration areas and by enumerators to navigate on the ground when they visited every address. In addition, maps are a major component of the display and dissemination of demographic data tabulated for one or more censuses. Applications that use the spatial and demographic information provided by census agencies often rely on maps to link the rich demographic data with geographic areas and so facilitate analysis, modeling, and decision making. The methods of creating maps from census data have, however, changed dramatically over the past half century. Traditionally, manual processes were used to record demographic information that can be matched to the street addresses on the map. Since the 1970s, computers have increasingly been used to automatically match demographic information to street addresses, extract demographic information, and make population maps.