As of May 2016, IPUMS-DHS includes over 2000 integrated variables from 90 Demographic and Health Surveys (DHS) in 21 countries, and allows researchers to select women, children, or births as their unit of analysis.
Bethel University Professor of History Diana L. Magnuson is documenting the growth of the Minnesota Population Center. Believing that preserving institutional memory is vital, the Center is supporting Magnuson’s work to capture oral histories of past and present MPC faculty and staff.
This is the first in a three-part series, featuring oral histories from John Adams, Todd Gardner, Dianne Star, and Dan Kallgren which offer a glimpse of the MPC before it was the MPC.
NHGIS recently launched a pair of web maps highlighting the available GIS files and striking changes in boundaries over time for two popular geographic levels. The ‘Census Tract’ map displays data for years 1910 to 2014, and the ‘Place’ map depicts data for 1980 to 2014. With each year listed as a separate layer, users can easily toggle specific years on and off to visualize the data.
Historical demographic data has been a big part of the Minnesota Population Center’s history. The MPC can trace its own lineage to the Social History Research Laboratory in the University of Minnesota’s History Department. Current MPC Director Steven Ruggles, and one of the MPC’s founding faculty members, Rus Menard, led a project to create a 1% sample of the United States’ 1880 census. Starting in 1988 the data was entered by professional data entry personnel reading microfilm. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the 1880 census was the first complete-count census that the historical census team at MPC worked on. The complete-count 1880 census was entered by Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints volunteers, introducing us to the challenges of working with data sources created by enthusiastic people around the world.
How and to what extent do our leaders and decision-makers need to address migration as a climate change issue? This issue was at the forefront of our minds recently when we had the unique opportunity to attend the 21st annual climate talks, known as the Conference of the Partners (COP21), in Paris, France in November and December of last year.
We participated in COP21 as part of a wider delegation from Minnesota that included past and current Minnesota state representatives, St. Paul Mayor Chris Coleman, and several other representatives from government and non-governmental organizations. Like previous meetings, the goal of COP21 was to convene a meeting of world leaders and to negotiate a global climate treaty, laying the groundwork for preventing global average temperatures from rising no further than a maximum of two degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels.
The TerraPop team is excited to announce the launch of a new, completely redesigned user interface. TerraPop enables research, learning, and policy analysis by providing integrated spatio-temporal data describing people and their environment. The new interface is more intuitive and easier to use. Choosing data and creating an extract are structured as a step-by-step process. You are guided through the workflow, seeing the information you need to make selections at each step. Throughout the process, you have access to complete metadata describing available variables, datasets, and geographic levels. Give the new extract builder a try at https://data.terrapop.org.
By 2020, MPC will make freely available to researchers worldwide 100% count U.S. Census microdata through 1940. This dataset will include over 650 million individual-level (1850-1940) and 7.5 million household-level records (1790-1840). The microdata represents the fruition of longstanding collaborations between MPC and the nation’s two largest genealogical organizations—Ancestry.com and FamilySearch—to leverage genealogical data for scientific purposes.
“The importance of this massive donation of census data would be difficult to overstate,” says MPC Director Steve Ruggles. “This is one of the largest-scale data-entry efforts ever undertaken.”