Blog

The newly released one-year 2017 American Community Survey is now available on Social Explorer. Fresh from the Census Bureau and now ready for you--subscribers can access this new data through our reports and maps. The American Community Survey (ACS) is an extensive annual survey administered by the Census Bureau to a sample of about three million households nationwide. In over 200 tables on dozens of topics, the survey includes variables o... more

As football fans around the globe get ready for the FIFA World Cup semi-final matches, Social Explorer put on its cleats and dug into data related to the four remaining teams. We looked at residents with the same ancestries as the teams to locate top fans who might be cheering the most. Find out more about US residents with ancestry ties to the different teams using American Community Survey Data (2012-16). (We used the modified cutpoints to help make each ancestry category, especially s... more

At Social Explorer, we spend a lot of time helping our users and making data easy for them. After a while we noticed certain trends and patterns in usage and the variables users looked for the most, such as age, sex, race, income, education, commute to work, house value, and many other. So, we decided to create a new tool that instantly provides you with the most essential data beautifully visualized and presented. We’re excited to announce  Demographic Profiles b... more

The royal wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle has put the spotlight on the former actress now known as the Duchess of Sussex. The conversations around Markle’s identity as a biracial American mirror how the U.S. Census Bureau has handled terminology and rules for the survey’s racial categories over the years. Markle, whose father is white and mother is black, has frequently commented on her mixed-race identity and the prejudices and confusion that she has faced.... more

Social Explorer offers detailed data on citizenship by age and race available in our maps and reports. These data come from a special tabulation by the U.S. Census Bureau. These data are available from Census 2000, as well as American Community Survey years 2009 through 2016. Explore the data across the nation and states all the way down to the census tract and block group level (where available). Referred to as CVAP (Citizens of Voting Age Population), the data... more

Startling new maps from the Anti-Discrimination Center vividly show the depth and breadth of residential segregation in the United States.  Powered by Social Explorer, the maps allow the public to explore at the state, county, census tract, and census block group levels.  Fifty years after the passage of the Fair Housing Act, residential segregation remains a fixture in American life. These interactive maps uncover extreme segregation in ways that mo... more

Want to print a Social Explorer map for your wall? Now you can! Social Explorer users have more control over map export than ever before. Here’s what we’ve been working on. Print-ready maps are just a click away We added the ability to control the dots-per-inch (DPI) setting. While this might not be critical if you’re working on an image for a blog post, you will definitely want to pay attention to DPI if you want to create a large print of a map. You can now... more

We’re incredibly excited to announce our new geocoder, one of the most accurate and powerful geospatial tools on the market. To achieve this, we blended data from many sources and used artificial intelligence for natural-language processing. We also used millions of real-life examples to train our intelligent scoring system based on various parameters: textual match, composition, viewport, and even popularity. Read on to find out more.  What is a geocoder? Geocoding... more

Whenever you hear people talk about poverty, they tend to talk about it as a line. You’re either above the poverty line, or below it. If you are below the line, that means one thing - you do not have enough money to meet the basic food, clothing, and shelter needs. Defining Poverty Poverty lines vary greatly by location and over time. Richer countries have higher poverty lines than poorer countries because the cost of living varies from place to place. Governmen... more

In "Are You a U.S. Citizen? How a 2020 Census Question Could Affect States," New York Times reporter Alicia Parlapiano explores the affects that the potential undercount in the next census could have on federal funding and congressional redistricting. The newly announced citizenship question asks whether or not people are legal citizens, which critics fear could discourage people from filling out the form.  Social Explorer's co-founder and president Andrew Beveridge... more