The Census for the Google Generation

I presented a talk on web visualisation of Census data at a couple of of conferences last week – a seminar at the Market Research Society (MRS) in London on Monday, and an extended version at the Census 2011 Impact and Potential conference on Friday at the University of Manchester. The talk is a look at various visualisations on the web, mainly of the 2001 UK and 2010 US census datasets. It also mentions the CensusProfiler project I worked on last year. I used several examples of work from Chris Gale at UCL Geography, who is working on potential geodemographics of the 2011 census.

I certainly hope to see some of these ideas implemented when the 2011 census aggregate data starts to be released – the “second stage” release, of univariate table at quite detailed (output area) level, is likely to be the most interesting, and is scheduled to happen in late 2012 or 2013, following the first stage release of the core metrics next summer. Having Stamen’s ThisTract webpages, and CUNY’s ethnicity change swipe maps for the UK data, for example, would be excellent.

You can download the talk in PDF form from here.