This additional resource brings usability and local-area specificity to the most currently available data.  Subscribers can access the 2006 Census estimates through the maps and the reports tabs.

Click here to find out more about subscribing for access to the new estimates and all of Social Explorer’s tools and resources.

Last week we put up the newly redesigned Social Explorer website. We have have improved the look and feel, navigation and added a new section called ‘Help’ which contains documents and examples on how to use Social Explorer. The help section was written and illustrated by Zanna Hendrey.

We hope you enjoy the new site!

We have started a mailing list for Social Explorer!

Our plan is to send out a simple news-letter email to our mailing list subscribers four to six times a year. This way we can keep you informed about new developments and data releases at Social Explorer, but not overwhelm your inbox. We hope you join.

Sign up here!

We have added a new feature to export Social Explorer slide shows to Microsoft PowerPoint.

Here is how it’s done:

Fist, you must be logged in either directly or by IP range.
1. click File->New Slide show
2. add a few slides
3. click File->Export to PowerPoint
4. set presentation title then click OK
5. wait while our system produces the slide show.

fig 1. Creating and exporting a slide show to PowerPoint.

fig 2. Enter presentation title and click OK to export.

fig 3. Save or Open the PowerPoint presentation.

Now that you have your presentation in PowerPoint, you can set slide transition property to move to next slide every x seconds. In fig. 4, I set the presentation to move to next slide every second, thereby animating the slide show. This works really well when you have maps over time. For example, you can show how U.S. grew from 1790 to 2000.

fig 4. Set Advance slide property to all slides in the presentation. This will automatically move to next slide every x seconds when the presentation is running.

Sample Presentation: Download 1790-2000 Population Density

Thanks to the good folks at the Opera Software company, we now support Opera Browser version 8 and 9. Opera used to report itself as MSIE in the navigator.appName() javascript function prior to release 9, so when they switched to identifying themselves as Opera, our scripts were a bit off.

We have been working on this data release for many months now, creating census tables, variables, maps, meta data and everything in between. Working with these historical data is hard because there are inconsistencies, some missing data, malformed table structures and other gotchas. Sometimes the data just don’t add up, and there is little you can do about it. But by and large, things came together very well. We really did not skimp on anything; we invested massive amounts of time making fine adjustments. How fine? Consider coming up with concise table titles and keeping them consistent over 15 decades of data. Even that seemingly simple task is actually pretty hard given that the questions keep changing thought the decades.

We are currently cross-checking the data for consistency and making sure everything adds up properly. We will likely bring these datasets out of beta very quickly because we have already done so much testing.

It is exciting and inspiring to finally see Andrew Beveridge’s vision, of visualizing U.S. from 1790 to 2000, come to life!

We hope you enjoy it!