National Historical Geographic Information System

University Of Minnesota-Twin Cities, Minneapolis MN

Investigators

Abstract

This project will enhance and expand the IPUMS National Historical Geographic Information System (NHGIS). NHGIS is the nation's most comprehensive source of geographic information for American people and places from 1790 to today. The project will add new data and tools to NHGIS to support broader, more effective studies of how populations and places have changed over time and space. Extending key data products back to 1970 and forward to include new 2020 data will enable researchers to investigate patterns and dynamics in population and housing characteristics at an exceptionally fine geographic resolution, leveraging data spanning over half a century. Providing new options for customizing data requests and accessing contextual information will streamline data access, interpretation, and analysis by connecting researchers more rapidly to the information they need. Redoubling outreach efforts will ensure that a diverse audience is aware of the scientific potential of NHGIS and that users have the support needed to apply relevant NHGIS resources toward productive research ends. These efforts will broaden the impact of NHGIS by making it both more powerful and more accessible, advancing a wide array of academic research as well as social science education, journalism, policy research from local to national levels, and private sector research. The project also will educate and train undergraduate and graduate students and participate in a program to recruit students from diverse backgrounds. NHGIS provides a unique laboratory for the spatial analysis of economic and social processes and offers the empirical foundation needed for developing and testing models of societal change. Over five years, this project will implement three major improvements to NHGIS: (1) Database expansion. The project will expand opportunities for high-impact research on small-area population change by producing new digital boundary files for 1970 census blocks and generating geographic crosswalks that link 1970 data to current census units. The project also will update the NHGIS collection to continue enabling linkages between the past and present by ingesting new 2020 census data and incorporating them into time series tables. These advances will allow for direct, reliable comparisons between census and American Community Survey small-area data from 1970 through 2026. (2) Data access and product enhancements. The project will add several new options for customizing the geographic extent of data extracts and for obtaining contextual information with data extracts. (3) User support, outreach, and dissemination. The project will sustain and expand NHGIS outreach efforts, offering user support and workshops, and creating blog posts and visualizations that highlight unique or underutilized NHGIS data on subjects of interest to a broad audience. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.