Social Explorer

I was messing around on the social explorer website and I thought it was very user friendly and I really enjoyed the slide show option! I am a very visual person and when I got to see the transition over the years one right after another I was fascinated.The most curious thing I noticed was the huge jump in race from 1970....

This clearly shows that the Southeast has the majority of black citizen in the 1970s, this is drastically different in the 1980 just 10 years later ....

In the 1980s there is a massive spread of the black race from the southeast through out the entire country. Seeing this on paper would not be as effective as looking at the pictures next to each other like we can with this social explorer website.

Back to the matter of if this website could be useful for examining the social,ethnic and cultural history of a place I think you can do all those things as long as it fell in the realm of 1790-2007 and was in the categories offered. Which it should be because there are many categories ranging from foreign born residents to veterans, education, even areas with the longest commute to work. The only problem I ran into was when I got the the more recent years (2005-2007) an error appear saying you needed the upgraded version. I have included a picture of the error below.

One other thing that might be an issue is a lot of the results are from the census tract and this is not always accurate. You can only take the data from people who will fill out the census questionnaires and not everyone does it. I am assuming the only truly accurate one is births because most hospitals log those types of things but I am sure there are still unrecorded births in the U.S.