First, let me say that I’m impressed by the many redistricting maps many of you have created recently. I’m happy that you have found my application useful. It’s been fun working on it and it makes it so worthwhile to see what you all are doing with it.
Today I uploaded an updated application with these new features, all of which are requests from those of you who have emailed me. They are…
— A button to assign all blocks according to the old CDs, so you can start your map with the current map and save time.
— Up to 500 CDs, so you can use the app for legislative districts, too. (Although there are no old LD polygons…yet.) The selection of #CDs is now a slider instead of a dropdown.
— Demographic info bar (at the bottom of the app’s screen) now has percentages, as well as the number of persons in each demographic group. Also, hover on the state population text block and get the demographics for the state.
Also, Pennsylvania is officially there now. (Actually the data has been there for a month; my apologies for not announcing sooner.)
Next up: adding NY and IL; and figuring out how to add partisan data. (DavidNYC has been assisting. Thanks!)
Thanks for putting this up. This will prove to be very useful, I think.
Two issues I notice off the bat:
1. I’m starting with Pennsylvania, because I know it best. When I specify 18 districts, and then choose the draw the old ones, the old 19th is the one left out. But one concern I have is, what if I’d rather cut out a different district (say the old 15th)? An active choice to say, for example, “draw old 8, and number it 18” would be useful (if more complicated!)
2. I notice that the old districts are not contiguous. I assume this is because te census bloc lines don’t line up perfectly.
Otherwise, this is an impressive improvement to what you already have. Thanks!
It would be nice if the white color that’s used for district 56, 112, etc. is changed, because it’s really hard to work with.
the only problem I’m having with the new version
because your map goes by block group, which doesn’t match up with precincts. You would almost have to switch to precinct or combined precincts, right? I’m glad you added more possible distrricts, because I was wanting to try to redistrict the Michigan State House.
just curious. thanks for all your work.
But i would like to encourage you to add Wisconsin soon. As i really would enjoy playing around with my state.
Not sure after NY and IL, but if you all ask for them, I’ll bump them up the list. Thanks!
I fixed the 2 bugs you all found today:
(1) Color 56 is no longer white (same as color 0, which is unassigned). Now I don’t reuse that color
(2) Fixed problem loading older saved files. Essentially I was expecting the order of the blocks to be the same. (I order them based on distance from the upper left corner (0,0).) But in the census bureau data, some blocks had center points that were not specified. They had been default to (0,0), but I had changed that to use the bounding box for the polygon, so the Assign Old CD feature would work. And that changed the order! This is a bad bug, so I got a fix quickly.
Thanks for catching these. Let me know if you find more bugs.
California!!! My home state and it would be nice to see Virginia and Maryland too. Also, do you know how soon you will have NY and IL up? Thanks.
It’s hard to work with these explosively growing Georgia counties like Forsyth and Paulding when the blocks have 15,000 people.
Is showing town lines for Massachusetts (and presumably the rest of New England.) We don’t use counties here for anything, they’re just a historic geographic designation and towns are the base political unit. (There are no “unincorporated” areas in the state.) Obviously you’d want to make the lines fairly thin, since there are 351 cities and towns in total, but currently I have to use a separate map with town lines and cross referencing can be confusion.
It would be helpful to have those added, especiallly for areas that are very diverse with strong representation from more than two ethic groups.