Use the census bureau's nice mapper with Netscape to create a map of 1990 demographic information for any area of the United States, by block group (about 1,000 people) or tracts (about 4,000 people).

MOVING AROUND IN NETSCAPE
Active links will be highlighted by color, underlined, or both. Click once on a highlighted section and you will go there. Click with the right mouse key on non-highlighted area and you will have the options "Back" and "Forward." These will let you retrace your steps at any time. Links which you have recently visited will probably have a different color. Download an image to your local computer with the right mouse key.

In addition to following hightlighted text to active links, or using a search engine, such as Webcrawler, by keyword for promising URLs, you can also type in a specific address (URL) at the Location box .

TOOLS
In Win 3.x under the pull-down Options, turn on toolbar, location, and directory buttons to see these at the top of the screen.  In Win95, these options are under the View pull-down.  Tool icons may include Back, Forward (you may find it just as easy to use the right mouse button); home (a location which you can change with General Preferences); Refresh; Print; Stop looking; and Find key word in current document. In both 3.x and 95 many options are available with the right mouse key.

SAVING TEXT, IMAGES, AND URLS
If you right-key click on a highlighted link or an image, options will include saving save the page or picture to a disk, or adding a "Bookmark," which will write the URL to your local CPU. Notice also the "Go" pull-down menu (with which you can backtrack quickly), and the Net Search directory (for hunting by key word, using a Netscape search engine).

ASSIGNMENT:
You will make a choroplethic map of demographic data using Census Bureau TIGER/LINE files and decennial census attribute data, for census tracts. You will convert between various file types, and use a variety of programs to publish your finished map. Since 1997 the census bureau has twice upgraded its mapping tool and the new one is much nicer than the original.  Find the new viewer at http://tiger.census.gov/cgi-bin/mapsurfer

1. Read the FAQ thoroughly
2. Select a city, township, county or zip code at the bottom of the screen
3. Turn on enough base map features from the check-off section, but not enough to clutter your map
4. Choose a theme, probably at the tract level.  The variables offered are a small sample of census data, already adjusted.
5. Select variable ranging method.  Notice quantiles is the default method.  Don't!
6. Experiment with the zooming, and then the settings.
7. Save the .gif file, and also save the legend!  You'll need to put these together.

1. Use the search engine to find a city on your map, and look at the STF1 (full count) and STF3 (sample) data.
1. note some pertinent values and add these to your map in Corel Draw, below.

• You can open your image in Paint or PBrush, but you'll have to convert it to a .bmp first
• You can import your image to Corel Draw, edit it, then export to a .tif
• change the size of the final map with the resolution.  In the example below I exported to a .tif at the custom setting of 150 dpi.  The 256 colors were not dithered.
• the .tif can be cropped in Lview and saved as an 87a .gif, which will go to your http directory.

EXAMPLE

© 1998 Erick Howenstine