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Quick Guides - Area Overview
You can get a quick statistical snapshot of any geographic area by clicking on the Area Overview link on the home page. The Area Overview is a good place to start to get a sense of demographic and housing conditions in your selected location. It's also a good jumping- off point for accessing other types of data analysis tools and content on DataPlace.

Selecting a location for an Area Overview
Searching: You can quickly find a location by typing the name of a location in the search box. Enter the name of a geographic area, such as a city or a town, or a zip code number. As you type in the search box, a list of areas pops up beneath the search box. DataPlace provides you with a list of all locations that match the letters as you type them, ranked in order of population. Continue typing into the search box, or scroll down the list and click on the desired location.

Browsing: Another way to choose a particular area is by clicking on the "Browse Places" link located immediately beneath the search box, or by clicking on the drop-down arrow to the right of this link. A pop-up box will appear to start the browsing process, which starts from the largest geographic areas and allows you to drill down.

Area Overview features
  • Thumbnail reference map. Click on the map for a larger image.

  • Rankings analysis. Next to the map, DataPlace automatically generates a brief analysis of indicators on which your selected location ranks high or low compared with similar geographies. Clicking on the name of another location mentioned in this text takes you to the Area Overview for that location. Clicking on an italicized indicator in this text pops up a detailed glossary description of the indicator.

  • Topics. The Area Overview displays a table of pre-selected statistical indicators that provide an overview of demographic and social, employment and income, housing, and mortgage lending conditions in your area of interest. These data points are a subset of all available indicators on DataPlace. You can see particular sets of indicators by clicking on the tabs at the top of the table. The default is Overview. The other indicator topics are Social/Demographic, Income/Employment, Housing, Mortgage Lending, and Federal Expenditures.
Histograms
Next to each indicator in the Area Overview or on the Rankings page is a histogram -- a graphical representation of an indicator's frequency distribution. The x- axis is the range of all the statistics in DataPlace for a particular indicator, with the right side of the axis representing the highest part of the range and the left side representing the lowest part. DataPlace condenses or expands the x-axis so that it is always the same length from left to right. The y-axis shows the number of places at each interval on the x-axis; higher bars represent more places, shorter bars represent fewer places. The comparisons made on each indicator's histogram relate to the type of place (e.g., state, county, etc.) under investigation. If looking at an indicator for a county, you'll see the histogram comparing that county to other counties in the US; same goes for states, tracts, and so on. A red bar represents where the particular place you're looking at falls on the x-axis. The y-axis doesn't show the level of that particular indicator, but shows your location and how many or few locations like the one you're looking at exist within the US for that particular indicator.

Consider the histogram for California's population in the histogram to the right. The 2000 Census had the population of California to be 33,871,648. Because California was the most populous state in the nation, and because it is alone in its large population, the red rectangle representing California is a small blip for the y-axis because it's the only state with that population; therefore, when it is the only one, the blip is small. Because it is the most populous, and because the x-axis is a graphical depiction of the entire range of values -- in this case state populations -- the red blip is also farthest to the right on the x-axis. The other thing to note is that most other states in the nation don't fall anywhere close to California's population. You can see this because the higher bars to the left -- the part of the x-axis where the lowest parts of the state populations numbers live -- show that most states fall in the lower part of the range, with the most states falling in the lowest interval.

If your area of interest is below the level of a state -- e.g., a city or county -- you can choose whether the histograms compare your area to similar areas across the entire United States or, more narrowly, to similar areas within the state. Clicking on the dropdown above the histogram column lets you see the two different sets of histograms.

Histograms take some getting used to. Look at the top 30 in the rankings page for a view of how they change from most populous to least populous. You'll find that the red blip moves down the scale from highest to lowest and that's actually quite common (Zipf's law).
  • What Next? The What Next section gives you quick access to other DataPlace features that provide a different look at your geographic area of interest. Clicking on the links takes you to a thematic map, a rankings page, or a scatterplot.

  • Location image. For most states and major cities, the Area Overview includes a related photo or visual image that's pulled from Wikipedia. Clicking on the image takes you to that location's Wikipedia page.

  • Housing Documents. DataPlace automatically extracts and displays a variety of KnowledgePlex content related to your selected location, including news, calendar items, and documents. KnowledgePlex is the premium online resource for affordable housing and community development professionals, providing housing-related information from across the nation.

  • Data Sources. The Data Sources list shows which data set(s) provide the indicators that are displayed on the current page. Clicking on the link for a particular data source takes you to more information about that data set, such as what geographic levels and time periods it covers.

  • Comparing places. To compare multiple places on the Area Overview page, enter a new location in the Search box at the top. A "Compare with ..." link will appear above the histogram column. Clicking that link displays comparisons of the places on the various indicators. To delete a location, click the orange X next to the place name.



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