Saturday, January 28, 2012

Proposed NYS Senate & Assembly districts available in GIS format

The New York State Legislative Task Force on Demographic Research and Reapportionment (commonly known as "LATFOR") has published its proposed new lines for State Senate and Assembly districts based on the decennial 2010 Census.

LATFOR posted its proposed district maps in PDF format, and also provided "block assignment lists" to delineate the proposed districts. The block lists indicate which Census blocks (the smallest level of Census geography) correspond to which district. But the Task Force didn't make the maps available in a format that you can easily use with mapping software or online maps.

In order to enable others to visualize and analyze these districts on maps, the Center for Urban Research (CUR) at the CUNY Graduate Center has converted these lists into two formats compatible with desktop and online mapping applications: "shapefiles" and KML files. (Shapefiles are commonly used by most desktop geographic information system, or GIS, software packages. KML files are used typically in Google Maps, Google Earth, and other online mapping applications.)

More HERE.

No comments: