Creating a Choropleth Map at the County Level

Question

I'm trying to create an animation of the population density of the Appalachian region from roughly 1790 to 2010 in decennial steps at the county level.

I've successfully created a choropleth for 2010 by modifying what was done in this tutorial by Nathan Yau. I've run into a few problems. For one, US county boundaries evolve rapidly over time so I can't use the same SVG file as in the tutorial. I think I need to do the following:

Obtain historical county boundaries as GIS files from here.
Convert GIS files into SVG files using Kartograph (after installing its numerous dependencies).
Obtain population data (with FIPS info) for each county in Appalachian region since 1790 from US census data.
Mimic what was done in tutorial to create choropleth for each decade and stitch together into animation.

This just seems insanely complicated for something so simple and I'm new to a lot of this so I'm not convinced I'll be able to get all of it to work. I guess my questions are the following:

Will the strategy I outlined work? Is there a better/simpler way to do what I'm trying to do?

Also, as for getting the census data, this also seems harder than it has to be. I just want a simple .csv file with say FIPS label, county name, and population for a given year, and yet the best I can find is something like this with a link to the actual source in some arcane format.

Thanks for any help!

Creating a Choropleth Map at the County Level

Answers (1)

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