My book, Exploring the US Census: Your Guide to America’s Data, has been published! You can purchase it directly from SAGE Publishing or from Barnes and Nobles, Amazon, or your bookstore of choice (it’s currently listed for pre-order on Amazon but its availability there is imminent). It’s $45 for the paperback, $36 for the ebook. Data for the exercises and supplemental material is available on the publisher’s website, and I’ve created a landing page for the book on this site.

Exploring the US Census is the definitive researcher’s guide to working with census data. I place the census within the context of: US society, the open data movement, and the big data universe, provide a crash course on using the new data.census.gov, and introduce the fundamental concepts of census geography and subject categories (aka universes). One chapter is devoted to each of the primary datasets: decennial census (with details about the 2020 census that’s just over the horizon), American Community Survey, Population Estimates Program, and business data from the Business Patterns, Economic Census, and BLS. Subsequent chapters demonstrate how to: integrate census data into writing and research, map census data in GIS, create derivative measures, and work with historic data and microdata with a focus on the Current Population Survey.

I wrote the book as a hybrid between a techie guidebook and an academic text. I provide hands-on exercises so that you learn by doing (techie) while supplying sufficient context so you can understand and evaluate why you’re doing it (academic). I demonstrate how to find and download data from several different sources, and how to work with the data using free and open source software: spreadsheets (LibreOffice Calc), SQL databases (DB Browser for SQLite), and GIS (QGIS). I point out the major caveats and pitfalls of working with the census, along with many helpful tools and resources.

The US census data ecosystem provides us with excellent statistics for describing, studying, and understanding our communities and our nation. It is a free and public domain resource that’s a vital piece of the country’s social, political, and economic infrastructure and a foundational element of American democracy. This book is your indispensable road map for navigating the census. Have a good trip!

See the series – census book tag for posts about the content of the book, additional material that expands on that content (but didn’t make it between the covers), and the writing process.