Use It for Good – Page 24 – News and information from IPUMS

Getting More from the Data: The IHIS Data Briefs

May 4, 2016May 4, 2016 by mpcblog

A year ago, the MPC’s Integrated Health Interview Series (IHIS) project launched their IHIS Data Briefs. IHIS offers an integrated version of the National Health Interview Surveys (NHIS). “The data briefs were a natural fit for the NHIS data,” says Julia Rivera Drew, co-principal investigator of IHIS and co-author of the Data Briefs. “We realized that there were great resources that were going underutilized in NHIS and this provided a way to let users know the contents of the database. The briefs allow us to introduce topics that our users may have been interested in, but didn’t know we covered.” The briefs have also helped Drew and her colleagues reach out to new kinds of users.

New Features in NHGIS Help Visualize Available Data

September 29, 2021April 18, 2016 by mpcblog

Screenshot3

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.

Measuring the ANZACs: Crowdsourcing a war effort

March 9, 2016 by mpcblog

unnamed

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.

Counting—and Redefining—the Cost of War

February 16, 2016February 11, 2016 by mpcblog

Hacker_headshot 2016 copy Associate Professor of History and MPC Faculty Member J. David Hacker made headlines in 2011 when he published a groundbreaking study of the total number of U.S. Civil War dead. Hacker argued that the widely-accepted figure of 620,000 was far too low. Using IPUMS, Hacker showed that the number of dead was at least 750,000—if not more. His article, “A Census-Based Count of the Civil War,” published in Civil War History, was introduced by the editors in the issue as “among the most consequential pieces ever to appear in this journal’s pages.”

Few demographic historians expect attention from mainstream press when they publish their research, but Hacker’s study attracted national interest, including interviews with the New York Times and National Public Radio.

Migration is a Climate Change Issue

February 16, 2016February 4, 2016 by mpcblog

copd3 — International Organization for Migration (IOM) Panel. Paris, France.

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.

New user interface for TerraPop

February 12, 2016January 4, 2016 by mpcblog

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.