Data Cardinality

Problem

North Carolina state senators and house members want to know how their district and neighboring districts have performed in creating new jobs in 2018. Employers were surveyed and the results were provided in a spreadsheet by zip code. This data will need to be sorted into the corresponding North Carolina house and senate district boundaries and presented visually.

Analysis Procedures

Methods

I started by adding the zipcode point data. Then I imported the excel data using the excel to table tool. Then I summarized the number of records (jobs created; in the spreadsheet this was indicated in the column labeled EMPLOY_SUM) in each zipcode in the excel table. Then I joined together the summary of the records in each zipcode and the zipcode point data. Then I used the select by attribute tool to select only those zip codes that had more than 0 records. I then created a layer from this selection and added it to the map. The resultant layer was then spatially joined to the house district polygon boundaries using intersect. I changed the symbology to graduated colors using the number of jobs created field with 5 classes. I created a map layout of that map and then I repeated the steps beginning back with the spatial join but this time using the senate district polygon boundary layer and created a layout of that resultant map.

Results

Application & Reflection

In this assignment, I learned how to join tabular and spatial data. This skill would allow me to do counts of myriad things in various polygon boundaries including counties, census tracts, school districts, states, countries, etc. An example would be, we are in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis and local government (NC) I'm sure would like to know just how many small business are affected by the current shut down and where. By collecting data regarding business closures from each county's government regarding closures then a map could be created to show which county's have the most small business's affected. I would merge the data together into one file and tally the number of businesses affected. I would then spatially join the county boundary file (easily downloaded from NC OneMap) to the small business data table.