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GEOG 3040/CV ENG 3050 – Intro to GIS

Lab 7 – Attribute Data

Many of the questions and requirements for this lab are embedded throughout the lab document.
They have been bolded and italicized to help you find them so you can address them as you work
through the lab. You will also find a recap of the questions and requirements at the end of the lab
document.

Background & Objective:

For this week’s lab we are going to get some practice working with attribute tables. We will
download some geometry data and attribute tables from the internet, join the geometry and
attribute tables to each other, export the joined geometry and attribute tables, appropriately
display our data, and build a map. We will not explicitly critique our map this week, but it
would be a good practice for you to get into to ensure your map is giving the reader the
information that you want them to have. What follows is an example of how one might
approach this lab.

ArcGIS Pro:
Open ArcGIS Pro and using the Blank Map Template, create a Project and label it appropriately.
Although this example does not explicitly require any of the data provided with our text, if you
want to use any of our class data for your map you may want to open the Catalog Pane and
connect to the folder that contains our data (mgisdata). Per this week's objective, we will bring
in geometry and attribute tables from external sources so we can build a map that pertains to
poverty in a particular state. For the example that follows, I will use the state of North Dakota.
Your scenario should also be state based—and you can use any state except for North Dakota.

To help decide which state to choose, you might want to explore the poverty map data
provided by Poverty USA at: https://www.povertyusa.org/data.

To start, we first need to find the geometry and attribute tables that will allow us to tell our
story of poverty. This week we will explore the geometry and table options available through
the US Census Bureau. If you have been around me much at all you know that I do not care for
Chrome and generally use Firefox instead. However, for some reason when dealing with the US
Census Bureau website, Firefox doesn't always work. If you run into issues, please try another
browser. Because of my relationship with Chrome, I will be using Microsoft Edge for the
following examples. (Those in the house that are in the know can give me a hard time if you
like)

To get started, let go get our geometry data. The geometry I am going to use for this week’s lab
is county boundaries. I plan on using county boundaries from the TIGER Line files. TIGER

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stands for Topologically Integrated Geographic Encoding and Referencing and is the native
format for most geometry that is available from the Census.

To begin our search, we'll go to and use the Web Interface:

https://www.census.gov/geographies/mapping-files/time-series/geo/tiger-line-file.html.
Notice that the Census website has already began offering the 2023 data. Since the interface
for 2023 may not yet to be developed, we'll go ahead and use the interface for 2020. Click on
2020. See the figure below.

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Scroll down until you find the download information for the Tiger files.
See the figure to the right. Click on Web Interface. Change Select year to
2020, Select a layer type to Counties (and equivalent), and click the Submit
button. On the new page that loads, click on the button labeled Download
national file.

Download and save the file and copy or move it to a location where you can find it, then unzip
the file as we have done since lab 1. In ArcGIS Pro, load the tl_2020_us_county.shp data into
your Map. Manually zoom-in on the lower 48 states of the US. Your Map should look like the
one shown in the figure below.

Questions

Looking at my county boundary data for the lower 48, it appears to me that the U.S. is short
and wide with a flat top. What might be the reason for that? What would you do to fix the
issue for the entire country? How might you do things differently if you had not yet exported
the counties for your state?

Decide how you want to move forward and export your states county boundary data. Ensure
that your state-based county map is complete and not suffering from the issues outlined
above.

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Hint: By default, many TIGER/Line shapefiles are in a Geographic GCS North American NAD1983
projection. That said, consider the Output Coordinate System that may be best for your state.

My export is shown in the image to the right.

Question

Include a screenshot of your corrected county

boundary data in your Map window in your lab
document.

Now we'll look at the attribute table for the

county boundary file (See figure below).

Notice that there aren't really any fields in the table that could be used to directly investigate
poverty. We will need to find data relevant to poverty by other means; in this case we can
locate data on poverty in other Census table(s). The key to being able to put the geometry (the
county boundaries) and the attributes together is a key field. In this case, the key field is
named GEOID.

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The Census defines the GEOID this way: “The Census Bureau and other state and federal
agencies are responsible for assigning geographic identifiers, or GEOIDs, to geographic entities
to facilitate the organization, presentation, and exchange of geographic and statistical data.
GEOIDs are numeric codes that uniquely identify all administrative/legal and statistical
geographic areas for which the Census Bureau tabulates data. From Alaska, the largest state, to
the smallest census block in New York City, every geographic area has a unique GEOID. Some of
the most common administrative/legal and statistical geographic entities with unique GEOIDs
include states, counties, congressional districts, core based statistical areas (metropolitan and
micropolitan areas), census tracts, block groups, and census blocks.” Read more about GEOIDs
at: https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/geography/guidance/geo-identifiers.html
It’s now time to get information on poverty and we'll use the Census Bureau's search tool for
this. Navigate to https://data.census.gov and type poverty into the search box to see what
types of data exist (See the figure below).

The search returns 350 Tables, 350 Maps, 28 Profiles, and over 10000 Pages of information.
Click on the first one under Tables that is titled: S1701 POVERTY STATUS IN THE PAST 12
MONTHS. (See the figure below).

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If your browser is not at full screen, make it so. We will need the viewing space for the next
step.

The data we are looking at comes from the 2022: ACS 1-Year Estimates Subject Tables. Let’s
change the table to the 2020: ACS 5-Year Estimates Subject Tables by clicking the dropdown to
the right and selecting the new table. See the figure below.

For this table to be

useful to us, we need
to do a little work on
it. First, we need to set the Geos (Geography) for our intended table. Click on the button
labeled Geos, then select County, then your state. For my example, looking at poverty in North
Dakota. I want to select All counties in North Dakota. See the figure below.

After you have selected your Geography, click the X to close that window. The table should
update and reflect your selections. See the figure at the top of the following page.

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If you look carefully at the table, you will notice that the counties are represented by the
columns and the attributes are represented by the rows. If we recall our county shapefile, the
counties were represented by the rows, and the attributes were represented by the columns. It
will be necessary to transpose the table to get the rows to have the counties in them and the
columns to have the attributes in them. To do this select the Transpose button. It may not be
visible until you click the More Tools button. See the figure below.

Our table now has a new look! See the figure at the top of the
following page.

It is now time to download our table. We have three options to

download our data, Excel, CSV, and ZIP. If we choose Excel or CSV,
the data are downloaded. If we choose ZIP, we have the option to
add more data than we had originally asked for. Be sure that you are
getting the data you want. I am going to select the ZIP file.

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Click the ZIP and confirm, again, that you are getting the data that you want. See the figure
below.

Click DOWNLOAD .CSV and make sure you know where the data download ends up. After
downloading it, extract (unzip) the zip file. You should have three data files that you have
extracted from the zip file. See the figure on the top of the following page. Remember, your
filenames may differ slightly from the ones you see below.

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Using Microsoft Excel, open the file labeled as data. Mine is named ACSST5Y2020.S1701-
Data.csv. Expand some of the columns so you can see the data. See the figure below.

We see that the first row contains the attribute names, which is a good thing. The second row
appears to have additional information about what the real meaning of the attribute named in
the first row. This will be an issue for us as each row in the attribute table needs to correspond
to one county in our geometry. We will need to remove the second row. Rows three to fifty-
five contain the data we are interested in for each county.

Looking at the columns, we can see that the fields go from A to ND. That is a lot of attributes.
We need to figure out which attribute(s) we want to have in our map. To do this we need to

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view the metadata csv file included with our downloaded data, the file name should be like
mine, ACSST5Y2020.S1701-Column-Metadata.csv. This file contains the metadata for our
downloaded table, open the file using Microsoft Excel. See the figure below.

Remember that metadata is data about our data. In doing so we can see that there are fact 369
attributes in the table. We now need to locate the attribute(s) we are interested in. Note: In
most cases you will deal with several attributes, in this lab we are going to simply deal with one.
The attribute we are interested in is S1701_C03_001E: Estimate!!Percent below poverty
level!!Population for whom poverty status is determined. In this case if we did not have the
metadata, we would be completely lost and would have no idea which attribute met our needs.

We will also need the GEO_ID field from the table, as well as the NAME field so we can use it to
verify that our geometry and attribute table are correct after performing our Join in ArcGIS Pro.
The easiest way to accomplish this is to copy the desired information from our data table and
paste it into a new Excel spreadsheet. Your new table should look something like the figure at
the top of the following page. Notice that I have already removed the second row that
contained the description of the attribute listed in the first row as was discussed above.

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Return to ArcGIS Pro for a moment and look

at the attributes from our county data layer.
Notice that the GEOID field appears to only
have five digits, not the fifteen that we see in
our new attribute table. This looks like what
we want, but to verify this field's Data Type,
right-click on the GEOID field name and select
Fields. Doing this shows information about
each field. It is important to note that in fact
we were correct about the length being five,
but they are not digits, they are characters.
The GEOID is defined as Text. See the figure
towards the bottom of this page.

This can be very frustrating in GIS research

because a Text field can have leading zeros
that would otherwise not be there if the field
was defined as Numeric.

The leading zeros in our Excel spreadsheet

should help us to determine what type of
data is in the GEO_ID field in our attribute
table. They're also characters; fifteen
characters in length, which is not the same
number as the five that we found in our
county boundary shapefile.

If we take a close look at the attribute table from our geometry and the poverty table at the
same time, we can see that there is some similarity between the GEOID and the GEO_ID. We
will need to ensure that both files are sorted by the county name. See the figure at the top of
the following page.

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I know that they do not line up perfectly, but we can see that the last five places of the GEO_ID
are the same as the GEOID. To grab those last five characters, we need to use Excel. To do this,
we'll use the RIGHT formula to get the first five characters counting from the right-hand side of
the GEOG_ID field. Create a new column in Excel to the right of GEO_ID. Call it GEOID. In the
new column, enter the formula: =RIGHT(Text,[number of characters]) where Text
is the GEO_ID and number of characters is 5. Do this for every row. It is a good idea to
name the sheet with a name that provides some metadata to the process. I named mine
nd_poverty.

If you're not familiar with using formulas, please consult the help in Excel, or search online for
examples.

Your spreadsheet may look like

the figure shown to the left. We
now need to save this spreadsheet
into a format that ArcGIS Pro can
understand. Save the spreadsheet
as an Excel Worksheet (*.xlsx).
After you save the xlsx file, exit the
application. It is important to do
this, otherwise ArcGIS Pro will not
be able to open the file.

Depending on how ArcGIS Pro was

installed on your computer, you
may be able to bring your new spreadsheet directly into ArcGIS Pro as a Table. This will only

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happen is a set of drivers has been installed that allows ArcGIS Pro to access the Excel file.
Mora information can be found here, https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-
app/3.1/help/data/excel/work-with-excel-in-arcgis-pro.htm. If the drivers have not been
installed, you will need to use the command Excel to Table. More information can be found
here, https://pro.arcgis.com/en/pro-app/3.1/tool-reference/conversion/excel-to-table.htm.

Once you have the table in ArcGIS Pro, open it once it has been added to the Contents Pane.
Unfortunately, we are unable to open the Field properties to make sure that the GEOID Data
Type is Text in the Excel file. If GEOID is not text, the next portion of the exercise will not work.
Since the GEOGID data are left hand justified in the column, we are going to assume that they
are text (that is a good sign and generally implies a text field is present). If you imported the
table into ArcGIS Pro, you will be able to check the field properties on the imported table.

Now it is time to put the geometry and attribute data together so that we can create a map of
the percent of individuals in North Dakota living below the poverty level by county. We do this
by Joining the two datasets together.

In the Contents Pane, right click on your counties

data layer and click Joins and Relates and then
Add Join. See the figure to the right.

This will open the Add Join tool. It may open as a

free-floating windows or may open in the
Geoprocessing Pane. For the Input Table select
your geometry, for the Input Join Field select
GEOID, for the Join Table select the *.xlsx file (or
table created with Excel to Table) created above,
and for the Output Join Field select GEOID. It is
good practice to click Validate Join to make sure
that the join in working the way you want it to.
Next, click Run to execute the tool. Open the
attribute table on your geometry layer, scroll to
the right, and make sure that the poverty
information from the Census that we created has been joined to the attribute table.

What is one way that you can make sure that your Join executed properly?

After you have inspected your join, and verified that it worked, export your counties to a new
shapefile. This is the only way to ensure that your join is permanent. Try out some initial
classifications and color choices to see how your data looks. Mine is shown in the figure at the
top of the following page.

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You will need to include a Layout page so you have a place to create your map. Add one
additional data layer of your choosing that helps to tell the story you want to tell with your
scenario. Make sure that all five elements are included on your map. Include a short
narrative about your scenario as well as a version of your final map.

Exercise:
For each lab exercise you will prepare a document with your answers to the questions posed
during the lab including any screen shots or maps that are requested. Please start with a fresh
Word document and do not reuse the lab document you got from Canvas. Name your file in
such a way that it contains the name of the author (you), the class (Intro to GIS), and the lab
number. You must upload your final lab assignment to Canvas. Do not forget your creative
response.

Pick any map scenario you like, but make sure the layout communicates it clearly. Include in
your lab document a short narrative that may include some or all of the following: what is the
purpose of your map, why did you include the data layers that you did, how do those data
layers help to tell the story you are trying to tell with your map, why did you choose the colors
that you did, why did you choose the classification method that you did, how are the data
related to the overall scenario that you chose, if you normalized the data, which attribute did
you choose and why, which layout, landscape of portrait, and why. Please add additional
information if it helps make a point for your map. Include an exported image of your map
layout.

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RECAP OF REQUIREMENTS & QUESTIONS FOR LAB 7:

Using geometry data & attribute tables, create a map and a corresponding narrative
pertaining to your topic at a state-level.

Your scenario must be state-based, and you can use any state except North Dakota.

Q: After adding the county shape data, why does the U.S. appear short and wide and how
might you fix this issue? How might you do things differently if you had not yet exported the
counties for your state?

Include a screenshot of your corrected county boundary data from your Map window in ArcGIS.

Q: What is one way that you can make sure that your Join executed properly?

Add one additional data layer of your choosing to help tell your scenario's story

Include a short narrative about your scenario that addresses some or all the following:
What is the purpose of your map?
Why did you include the data layers that you did?
How do those data layers help to tell the story you are trying to tell with your map
Why did you choose the colors that you did?
Why did you choose the classification method that you did?
How are the data related to the overall scenario that you chose?
If you normalized the data, which attribute did you choose and why?
Which layout did you choose (landscape or portrait) and why?
Please add additional information if it helps make a point for your map!

You will need to include a layout page for your final map that includes these five map elements:
A map title
A directional (north) arrow
A scale bar
A legend
Cartographer information (i.e., your name, the date, data sources, projection
information).

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