Data Cardinality

Jobs Created in NC House and Senate Districts

Problem: We want to determine the number of jobs created per district in both House of Representative and Senate districts across North Carolina.  The end result of this assignment will include two maps that have include spatial join and tabular reference processes.

Analysis: In order to solve this problem, I have to determine how to locate available data, and determine the formatting of provided data.  I received different GIS files from North Carolina State University’s GIS Library.  Included files are layers containing House and Senate Districts, in addition to a database file of jobs created in each district. I will use this provided data in ArcMap, and use tabular and spatial joins in order to accurately provide jobs per district results.

I downloaded senate and house shape files from NCSU’s GIS library.  In addition, I downloaded usa_zip file that contained the number of jobs that were created per zip code, and the zip_poly file that contained zipcode polygons from the United States.  There was also an excel database that was dropped into ArcMap as a database file.  The house and senate were both in shape files that had polygons of each of their districts.  The other two polygon files had to be narrowed down using the select by attributes feature to only contain data from North Carolina.  These were both saved as new shape files.  All of the files had to be projected to the current North Carolina projection.

The next step was to summarize the data provided in the excel database.  This was done by opening the database, highlighting the column ‘Zip_Text’ and summarizing it.  A new file was saved containing the summarized data.  Next, I took that data and completed a tabular join t to the zip code shape file, which provided points on our map of the total number of jobs per zip code.  The next step was to complete a spatial join that file to each of the house and senate file.  This provided the results that we were looking for, the total number of jobs created for each senate and house district.

Picture1
Results:

Jobs Created by House District:
FINAL Cardinality021614 House2

Jobs Created by Senate District:
FINAL Cardinality021614 Senate2

Application and Reflection

Problem Description: This will be useful as I go into my field of study in many ways.  I can use these procedures, as an example to analyze the number of visitors from each county that visited North Carolina State Parks on days when we captured their data with surveys.  I can see myself using this type of GIS framework in my thesis in that way, and to determine which state parks are considered rural by census data, and how visitors to different parks come from different areas.

Data Needed: Data required for this analysis would be a visitor use database file from all of the State Parks in North Carolina.  This file should contain zip codes from users and the State Park that they visited.  We would also need layers that contain both state and county boundaries.

Analysis Procedures: This process would include adding layers and database files to ArcMap, completing tabular and spatial joins, and then interpreting the results through the visual representation.