I'm trying to create an animation of the population density of the Appalachian region from roughly 1790 to 2010 in decennial steps at the county level.
I've successfully created a choropleth for 2010 by modifying what was done in this tutorial by Nathan Yau. I've run into a few problems. For one, US county boundaries evolve rapidly over time so I can't use the same SVG file as in the tutorial. I think I need to do the following:
- Obtain historical county boundaries as GIS files from here.
- Convert GIS files into SVG files using Kartograph (after installing its numerous dependencies).
- Obtain population data (with FIPS info) for each county in Appalachian region since 1790 from US census data.
- Mimic what was done in tutorial to create choropleth for each decade and stitch together into animation.
This just seems insanely complicated for something so simple and I'm new to a lot of this so I'm not convinced I'll be able to get all of it to work. I guess my questions are the following:
Will the strategy I outlined work? Is there a better/simpler way to do what I'm trying to do?
Also, as for getting the census data, this also seems harder than it has to be. I just want a simple .csv file with say FIPS label, county name, and population for a given year, and yet the best I can find is something like this with a link to the actual source in some arcane format.
Thanks for any help!
