19 ms·
The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per Person for the Entire U.S.
- vitaminwater 12y agocrazy how less dense western US is, when disregarding california...
- calinet6 12y agoIt is truly another world, with so much wilderness. This difference changes the culture greatly as well, and how people think about land, the earth, and other people. You can find good people and good places everywhere, but the west really is better in nearly all respects.
- ctdonath 12y agoThis difference changes the culture greatly Hence the importance of liberty as an axiom of federal governance: one group with particular cultural interests (say, deep urban) should not impose their situation-specific views on others far away with radically different cultural interests (say, rank wilderness). What some may find need to prohibit in one situation, others may find necessary to survival in another. The lack of respect of axiomatic liberty causes dangerous sociopolitical tensions.
- calinet6 12y agoWoah that went political real quick like. Ironically, the people in the West, surrounded by the most land and wilderness, have the most liberal political leanings. Being connected to the wilderness means you realize how insignificant our tiny wants and needs are compared to the whole.
- nemo 12y agoVery true. Sadly, the reality of the structure of our government is such that rural areas have a greater representation in our governance than denser more urban areas.
- ctdonath 12y agoUs rural types find the reverse practically true, even with representation explicitly skewed in our favor: urban centers regularly out-vote us by a long shot.
- stevenhubertron 12y agoVery cool looking. Now I can show my NY friends how diverse Denver really is and why there is a great multicultural food scene.
- bitJericho 12y agoDenver had awesome food when I was up there recently! Boggles my mind that my colleagues were hitting up McDs!
- lotharbot 12y agoIt's interesting to note: in the late 1960s Denver was quite segregated. A 1974 Supreme Court decision led to students being forced to ride the bus across town to mix with students of other races (I rode from southwest Denver to Five Points for a few years in elementary school.) One of the major results was white families moving out of the Denver city limits. They ended forced busing in 1995. Denver now has one of the most diverse populations in the US, though it's often hurt by measurements that treat "white hispanic" (22%) and "non-hispanic white" (50%) as both just white. Denver is home to the largest Mongolian population in the US, one of the largest Native American Pow-Wows in the US, plus significant African American, Chinese, Japanese, Jewish, Russian, Polish, Ethiopian, and Lebanese groups. While there are some enclaves, there are a lot of very mixed neighborhoods as well. http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/court-says-denver-can-end-forced-busing.html http://www.nytimes.com/1995/09/17/us/court-says-denver-can-e... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denver http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Denver
- stevenhubertron 12y agoWow, thanks for this bit of history. I learned a few things about my town today!
- santaclaus 12y agoMmm Voodoo Donut.
- exelius 12y agoThis is fascinating. It really shows how racially segregated a lot of cities are. But from my knowledge of a few cities where I've lived, all the "cool" places to live are very mixed. Not sure if that says more about my idea of desirable places to live or the effects of gentrification, but this map is definitely very thought-provoking. Thanks for sharing.
- rayiner 12y agoIf you're talking about NYC or San Francisco or the like, the "cool places" are ones where higher-income white people are pushing out the lower-income minorities that used to live in those neighborhoods. The mixture is temporary.
- steren 12y agoWhat a clickbait title
- mxfh 12y agoEspecially since this map is around since August 2013. http://flowingdata.com/2013/08/12/racial-dot-map/ http://flowingdata.com/2013/08/12/racial-dot-map/ NYT did one in 2010: http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/explorer (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008383 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2008383) Other static versions as of 2010: http://flowingdata.com/2010/09/20/race-and-ethnicity-by-mapped-by-block/ http://flowingdata.com/2010/09/20/race-and-ethnicity-by-mapp... Too bad the tileserver of the density map by Brandon Matt Anderson is currently broken: http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html http://bmander.com/dotmap/index.html but you could still get gourgeous prerendered images here: http://bmander.com/dotmap/store.html http://bmander.com/dotmap/store.html
- tedunangst 12y ago? One dot per person. Exactly as advertised.
- dj-wonk 12y agoDoes this graph accurately indicate overall population density across the map? Or does over-plotting hide the city population densities?
- dj-wonk 12y agoIn theory, I think so: > Each of the 308 million dots are smaller than a pixel on your computer screen at most zoom levels. Therefore, the "smudges" you see at the national and regional levels are actually aggregations of many individual dots. The dots themselves are only resolvable at the city and neighborhood zoom levels. http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map#thedots http://www.coopercenter.org/demographics/Racial-Dot-Map#thed... However, it would depend if high levels of smudging max out the color intensity of a pixel. This could be solved with normalization, but I don't know if they did.
- nightcracker 12y agoIndeed, I have never seen such a collection of slow-loading pictures.
- colanderman 12y agoDots should darken (or enlarge) when zooming in; as-is, because the dot-density decreases, the image as a whole lightens and becomes difficult to see at high zoom levels.
- dj-wonk 12y agoI was wondering about this. Any suggestions on papers or code that detail that technique?
- jws 12y agoIts a tough problem, the "real" physical solution is bad the other direction. If I zoom out to see the whole contiguous 48 states, each pixel on my screen is about 10 square kilometers. Consider filling the screen with that 10 square kilometers. For say, San Francisco, that gives me 13000 people to place in something like a million pixels of white. That is a nice density for a dot map, but my screen is mostly white. If we want to keep the color density, when we zoom out to see the country, even San Francisco is going to be a mostly white pixel. With continuous smooth zoom you could smoothly change the size of the person dot from a 1/10th of a pixel to one pixel and probably come up with a nice effect, but you'd need to be rendering at 30fps or so to be smooth and this web site doesn't seem to be built for that.
- tokenadult 12y agoThe actual title of the submitted resource is "The Racial Dot Map: One Dot Per Person for the Entire U.S." I'm pretty sure that this has been submitted to HN before. It loads rather slowly on my computer here. A zoomed-out view does do a good job of showing the remarkably low population density of the Great Basin in the western United States, which was formerly known as The Great American Desert. Presence or absence of sources of abundant fresh water has a huge influence on population distribution in the United States. A zoomed-in view of my metropolitan area, the Twin Cities of Minnesota, shows the overall conurbation of the two cities and their suburbs reasonably clearly, but with some rather odd blank spots on a closely zoomed-in view that appear to correspond to census tracts with few actual residences, not matching the actual distribution of built-up or undeveloped areas in quite the way that most residents of this area would expect. (Some of the blank spots in south Minneapolis correspond to lakes in the City of Lakes.) Of course an industrial park can have a high daytime occupancy of interacting human beings while being almost empty at night, and the other way around for a residential zone. For any data collected by the United States federal government about race, one has to go to the definition statements from the Bureau of the Census: "The U.S. Census Bureau collects race data in accordance with guidelines provided by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and these data are based on self-identification. The racial categories included in the census questionnaire generally reflect a social definition of race recognized in this country and not an attempt to define race biologically, anthropologically, or genetically. In addition, it is recognized that the categories of the race item include racial and national origin or sociocultural groups. People may choose to report more than one race to indicate their racial mixture, such as 'American Indian' and 'White.' People who identify their origin as Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish may be of any race."[1] All of the definitions are arbitrary, and some are very arbitrary indeed and imply divisions of personal behavior that don't exist in actual practice. (My household is poorly defined by the Census data gathered under the OMB rules, and I live with people of another "race," whom I prefer to regard as my fellow human beings, every day of my life.) In Minneapolis, it's not a big surprise to see concentrations of "black" people (historically African-American people in north Minneapolis and recent Somali immigrants in south Minneapolis). In St. Paul, the "Asian" people are mostly recent Hmong immigrants. Hispanic people (mostly recent immigrants from Mexico) have increased greatly in number in this area in my lifetime. A typical set of signs at a public library in the metropolitan area will be written in English, Spanish, Somali, and Hmong here. [1] http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/meta/long_RHI525211.htm
- pea 12y agoJesus, look at the difference between EPA and Palo Alto. I knew it was segregated, but amazing what one road can do.. http://imgur.com/JrLzd8X http://imgur.com/JrLzd8X
- jroseattle 12y agoReminds me of this old picture of the racial makeup around 8-mile in Detroit: http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/09/140909162349-large.jpg http://images.sciencedaily.com/2014/09/140909162349-large.jp... Green = African American, Orange = Caucasian FWIW, having moved from the St. Louis area and traveling through Ferguson MO on a daily basis, it's obvious to me the racial makeup is a symptom/result of economics. Race + economics is a hard ship to steer, for sure.
- pessimizer 12y ago>Race + economics is a hard ship to steer, for sure. Or it's a really easy ship to steer, and racial makeup is a symptom/result of preferences, planning, legislation, and enforcement.
- sehr 12y agoIt'd be really interesting to see one based on income now
- calinet6 12y agoHey why the hell is there a tightly packed cluster of black and hispanic people north of San Luis Ob—.... oh. http://i.imgur.com/HXZ09dh.png http://i.imgur.com/HXZ09dh.png
- omnibrain 12y agoIs that a prison?
- Systemic33 12y agoCalifornia Mens Prison according to Google Maps.
- rkuykendall-com 12y agoTo save others from looking it up: "California Mens Colony Prison"
- frewsxcv 12y agoTo save others from Googling: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Men%27s_Colony https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_Men%27s_Colony
- igl 12y ago°o(Apartheid is huge in america!) I have some business ideas! Racially segregated car sharing! Racially segregated clothing (ok that one might be too flooded already) Racial Segregation -- the Magazine(!) DOWN VOTE NOW!
- ausjke 12y agoIs this correct? I thought the Hispanic and the black are like 40~% already, the picture still give you the impression that non-white is something just like 5% Also, there are only two melting-pots, one in NY and one at CA, per the picture.
- kevincennis 12y agoWell, a lot of the blue you're seeing is in rural areas. It looks like a lot, but it's pretty low-density.
- sp332 12y agoAmerica is 77% white. http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/00000.html
- Symmetry 12y agoOnly if you count the 17% who are hispanic as white, otherwise it's 62%. But Hispanic white people will probably stop being viewed as a separate racial groups before that long, as happened with the Irish.
- sp332 12y agoYeah I mean, they're still of European descent, why not call them white? I know, race is fuzzy. Edit: For the US Census, Hispanic people are of "Spanish culture or origin regardless of race."
- pessimizer 12y agoBlack Americans are also largely of European descent, so why not call everyone white?
- sp332 12y agoWorks for me :) Or at least move a lot more people into the "two or more races" category.
- whistlerbrk 12y agoBoo... "Other Race / Native American / Multi-racial" Turns out composition is better than inheritance for so many things.
- tejon 12y agoCan't we all just switch to a functional paradigm? Alternate one-liner: Click the lower button on the left and everyone turns into a duck!
- ctdonath 12y agoThe race section of the full Census data tables is actually quite large (something around half the total data), breaking race down into a host of combinations of varying degrees.
- BrandiATMuhkuh 12y agoThis remind me a lot to sanddance http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=188294 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/video/default.aspx?id=188...
- C7E0F338E42448 12y agoman I am so tired of races. divided and labeled in every possible context. what the hell is white anyway. a mixture of millions of unknown origins, only you happen to come out with a pale skin.
- oftenwrong 12y agoIt is the "floating signifier" after all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk9MZvOd2c http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bRk9MZvOd2c (NSFW)
- dj-wonk 12y agoPart 1 of 7 (linked above) is 10 minutes long and worth watching. It is NSFW only because of the intro clip from Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing. The series of videos contains an introduction by kruger97 (his Youtube name; I don't know his real name), then an interview with Stuart Hall, then a speech by Hall. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_Hall_(cultural_theorist... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_signifier
- oxalo 12y agoI think it'd be interesting to see this map in conjunction with a map of housing prices.
- tbeutel 12y agoAnyone notice the triangle of people floating in the empty space at the southwestern corner of San Francisco near Lake Merced? That appears to be the Olympic Club golf course. Do people actually list the golf course as their home address on their census forms?
- epmatsw 12y agoThere's a park near me that appears to have several hundred or thousand Asian people living in it. I'm not sure how accurate this data is...
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- wuliwong 12y agoThe data isn't accurate to address, it's to some area, a little larger. I forget what. But the dots are randomly distributed in that area.
- JoeAltmaier 12y agoCool! I live in a rural area, and I found my dot!
- thornygreb 12y agohttp://synthpopviewer.rti.org/ http://synthpopviewer.rti.org/ has better locations and the points are households, not people.
- lotharbot 12y agoOn the down side, this appears to show "white Hispanic" as white, which makes Denver look like a giant sea of sameness instead of one of the most diverse cities in the country.
- thornygreb 12y agoThat is because hispanic is not a separate race according to the census it is an ethnicity. There are white hispanics and black hispanics, etc.
- lotharbot 12y agoI understand and reject that reasoning. When you're mapping diversity, put me and my pasty-white Anglo-Dutch ancestry and my neighbors who grew up in Mexico in different categories.
- thornygreb 12y agoAnd that is your right, you can make your own map, the census is freely available. It isn't a 'diversity' map, it is a map showing census data for race, income, household size and age, not ethnicity.
- lotharbot 12y ago> "you can make your own map" or use the one in the original post. I'm just clarifying why I prefer that map over the one you linked to.
- gone35 12y agoSo much for 'the melting pot'... This society still has a long way to go.
- wuliwong 12y agoWhere do you want to "go" as a society? Is the goal to have the same "diverse" racial distribution in every community? I for one am ok with people living in communities that are mostly of the same race. I think these communities preserve cultures better. Something I personally would not like to see disappear. For instance, I would not like Chinatown to become 50% white, 20% black, 20% hispanic and 10% asian or something. I think that would be terrible. As long as there isn't legislation that is forcing or evening economically coercing people to live in segregated communities, I kinda like just having the chips fall where they may and people live where they feel comfortable. I also wonder what other countries would look like if this same analysis was applied? My guess is that you'd see the same basic result. Cities more diverse, rural areas less. Within cities, you'd still find segregation.
- lotharbot 12y agomy mom taught me this analogy as a kid: "we don't want a 'melting pot'. We don't want everyone to become the same. We want something more like a 'mixed salad' -- all the pieces bring their own unique flavor and contribute to the whole. It's OK if some bites have a little more tomato and others have a little more carrot. Just don't be that picky eater who pushes all of the cucumber off to the side like it doesn't belong."
- humbyvaldes 12y agoHispanic is not a race, it's an ethnicity. You can be Asian, Black or White and be hispanic.
- moron4hire 12y agoI find the fully-zoomed in view to be the most fascinating. To be able to see the administrative lines appear, like the diamond of DC, even though it's one gigantic metropolis almost all the way up to Baltimore. And definitely confirms what I already knew about Philadelphia: extremely segregated.
- tejon 12y agoAm I the only person slightly miffed that this isn't presented on a black background?
- thrownaway2424 12y agoI don't think the chosen palette is perceptually uniform in intensity, either, at least not on my display. A whole whack of white people (sky blue dots) looks less populous than the same number of Asian people (red dots)
- crescentfresh 12y agoPanning around randomly I stumbled on this curious little area: http://i.imgur.com/42VLDN4.png http://i.imgur.com/42VLDN4.png I thought whoa that's cool, a dense little community of minorities. Turns out: https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z https://www.google.ca/maps/@39.6908437,-86.4131159,15z Damn it.
- moggflunkies 12y agoLOL
- deleted 12y ago[deleted]
- Padding 12y agoThat's mean :P
- kpennell 12y agoNice find. Interesting to see an effect of the drug war manifested on a map.
- rayiner 12y agoThat's a state institution, and only 17% of state prisoners are there for a drug offenses. 83% of those dots are in for something else. There is some sort of weird need for certain groups of people to ascribe all crime to the drug war. I assume its a result of their holding worldviews incompatible with the fact that the world has lots of bad, antisocial, people.
- dragonwriter 12y ago> That's a state institution, and only 17% of state prisoners are there for a drug offense. That doesn't mean that only 17% are there because of the drug war. > There is some sort of weird need for certain groups of people to pretend that crime only happens because of the drug war. Perhaps, but that's no more weird than the weird need for certain groups of people to minimize the impact of the drug war, e.g., by pretending that the only people who are imprison because of the drug war are those convicted of drug offenses. Prosecutions conducted as part of the war on drugs aren't all "drug offenses" any more than prosecutions conducted as part of Prohibition were all liquor offenses.
- ctdonath 12y agoTo those dots can we easily add local population density, and income?
- dpweb 12y agoOur goal should be a society without racial distinction.
- malloreon 12y agoI never know where "Indian" fits in these breakdowns.
- viewer5 12y agoLooking at my university's campus, I'm pretty positive this map files them under the "Asian" category.
- cmsmith 12y agoAs expected, you can see 5 green dots at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave in DC. Is there anywhere else that we can do better at tying dots to individuals?
- tedunangst 12y agoWho's the fifth?
- Groxx 12y agoI wish maps like this would label in which order they draw the dots. It makes a difference. This one, for instance, appears to draw (bottom up) "White", "Black", "Hispanic", "Other", "Asian" - this over-represents the races higher up on the list, especially in densely populated areas. That solid block of red? It probably has other colors underneath, but you can't see them, and they don't tell you this. This is one of the nicer maps like this that I've seen, but excluding that info is blatantly misleading.
- boyaka 12y agoEven better, why not just let people enable/disable the ethnicities? Could even make it so it draws the most recently enabled race on top of the rest. I'm trying to get an idea for where each ethnicity lives and it would be so much easier if I could just look at one at a time.
- Groxx 12y agoYeah, I've seen a rare few that offer this, though usually not re-arranging which are on top. It's usually surprising just how biased the default display is :\ That said, it still surprises me that these map makers (all of them! not just this one) don't take the simpler approach of drawing all dots in a random order - e.g. get rid of this "first all blue dots, then green, etc" behavior, and pick the next dot's color randomly, while maintaining the distribution. Then you'd have an unbiased "top layer" regardless of the size of your dots (up to a point, obviously). (hard to describe what I'm thinking of... basically `[red, red, ... * 25, green, green, ... * 10, orange, orange].shuffle.draw` rather than just `[].draw`)
- lttlrck 12y ago1 dot = 1 person. Zooming in and out doesn't expose any particularly bad distortion of the underlying data at the lower zoom levels. It seems to work really well to me, is there region in particular where you see a problem?
- Groxx 12y agoecdavis notices this inconsistency: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8303845 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8303845 plus has a second source to back it up. Otherwise, just look around at densely populated areas. Like this asian-heavy area: http://cl.ly/image/1z0Q1T1V2V0N http://cl.ly/image/1z0Q1T1V2V0N (edit 2: turned off smoothing, that's actual pixels) note that immediately-surrounding areas have blue dots, but not that one. Meanwhile, you can see less than one dot sized dots for orange and blue poking out, but no orange or blue complete dots on top of the red. Look at other dense areas, you'll see the same thing - some colors are exclusively on top of others, and it's always the same ones. (edit: for context, that block is in the middle here, in San Francisco: http://cl.ly/image/3m3N3f423S0M http://cl.ly/image/3m3N3f423S0M) There isn't enough room for them to have fit one person per pixel, so they're stacked (somewhat). This favors the ones stacked on top.
- araes 12y agoSo many great data analysis exercises that could be run with such a set. Effectively, you could create scalar variables representing lots of different population statistics on a country, state, city, ect level. Density: http://i.imgur.com/bfVdrbK.png http://i.imgur.com/bfVdrbK.png Racial Density / Clustering: http://i.imgur.com/pQDJLtX.png http://i.imgur.com/pQDJLtX.png Terrain / Feature Clustering: http://i.imgur.com/AH9f2KW.png http://i.imgur.com/AH9f2KW.png City Homogeneity: http://i.imgur.com/Lo3X6KI.png http://i.imgur.com/Lo3X6KI.png City Racial Mixing: http://i.imgur.com/VBzLPI6.png http://i.imgur.com/VBzLPI6.png or http://i.imgur.com/ldIgYaw.png http://i.imgur.com/ldIgYaw.png City Cluster Homogeneity: http://i.imgur.com/2TLabMj.png http://i.imgur.com/2TLabMj.png vs http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png Cluster to nearby dot gravity (how much do dots spread from a nearby loci): http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png http://i.imgur.com/LlsAMx4.png vs http://i.imgur.com/qNkMCcu.png http://i.imgur.com/qNkMCcu.png And that doesn't even cover stuff that's harder to show like gradients, edge analysis (who's likely driving between two towns?), or migration patterns if multiple census years are available.
- bsamuels 12y agodoes anyone have a good explanation as to why each side of the US has such dramatically different population patterns?
- ecdavis 12y agoGeography and climate. The western US is very mountainous with lots of desert areas.[0] The east, in comparison, is very flat with plenty of water and climates more suitable for farming.[1] Population in the west is therefore more clustered around the few areas suitable for human settlement. If you're talking about the racial population patterns, that's a product of history and geography (again). European settlement of the US started in the north-east, African slaves were brought mainly to the south-east and Hispanic migrants come largely from the south, across the border with Mexico. [0] http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/USA_topo_en.jpg http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/2/2d/USA_topo_... [1] http://www.okatlas.org/okatlas/weather/climate/usa/climate.gif http://www.okatlas.org/okatlas/weather/climate/usa/climate.g...
- ecdavis 12y agoI don't know if it's the color choices, the dot placement, or some combination of the two, but this appears misleading to me. Looking at the Central District in Seattle, one could be forgiven for thinking it is a majority black area.[0] In fact, African-Americans only make up ~20% of the population there (very high for the PNW, but hardly a majority). The New York Times census map gives a far more accurate image of the racial demographics of that neighborhood.[1] I believe the NYT map only has one dot per 100 people, which means the dots are larger and less crowded. Notably, the NYT map uses green dots for white population and blue dots for black population - the reverse of the map linked here. That means if the color choices are having an impact on the way we perceive mixed neighborhoods, the effect is the opposite depending on the map you look at (i.e. you are more likely to think a mixed area is majority black when looking at the OP map, majority white when looking at the NYT map). It's worth thinking about color perception and optical illusions when viewing maps like this.[2] I love map-based visualizations - they're interesting and fun to look at. Nonetheless, I don't think they're the best way of conveying demographic information. EDIT: Groxx has a fantastic comment about the order in which the dots are drawn. This could explain my observations. [0] http://imgur.com/SWmuX1b http://imgur.com/SWmuX1b [1] http://imgur.com/lEwahHd http://imgur.com/lEwahHd (http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map http://projects.nytimes.com/census/2010/map) [2] http://www.illusionspoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Color-Adapting-optical-illusion-9.jpg http://www.illusionspoint.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Col...
- smackfu 12y agoYeah, colors are hard. Compare the full saturation red they are using for Asian to the baby blue for White. The red stands out more than the blue, even though they are both supposed to represent one person.
- smackfu 12y agoIf you zoom in, it gets lighter. That's unexpected, and seems to be an error in their averaging code. Maybe it's not averaging using HSV but in RGB?