30  The Census/ACS Data Portals

This chapter describes two portals to datasets with US Census microdata. We will also refer to these as “ACS” data. That refers to the American Community Survey, which is run all the time by the US Census, but between the decennial Census years.

We call it “microdata” because it’s not the usual Census data you read about, the kind that tells you how many plumbers live in your county. This is data about individuals, which makes it deeply interesting; every case, every row is a story, some actual person. We find ourselves caring more about these people than we do about most data.

As to the number of plumbers, that’s now something you have to calculate yourself.

The basic idea in either of these portals is this:

• Use the options or attributes tab to tell the plugin which attributes (columns) you want to import. You should shop around to see what you want.

• Type how many people you want into the box. There may be limits, but if not, don’t try to get more than about 5000 at a time.

• Press a button labeled something like get people to download your data.

30.1 The “small” portal

30.2 The “big” portal

You can also access this portal from any CODAP document by choosing Microdata Portal in the Plugins menu.