Racial dot maps

SocScape - mapping residential segregation and racial diversity

This website made available racial dot maps calculated based on 2010 high resolution demographic grids for each county in the conterminous U.S. Data are organized as a zip archive for each state in the conterminous U.S. Each zip archive contains racial dot maps for counties in this state. 

The racial dot map includes seven separate racial/ethnicity groups: (non-Hispanic) whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans, Pacific Islanders, groups who declared "Some other race" and Hispanic origin regardless of the race category. Racial categories are stored in the race_cat field in the attribute table. 

For more information, please see also the Tutorial: "Working with racial dot map in QGIS." 

Downloading racial dot maps 

  1. From the dropdown menu, select the name of the state where the county is located. Click on the "Download" button to download a zip archive with the racial dot maps for all counties in this state. Name of state zip archive contain 2-letters state code (i.e., IL indicate Illinois)
  2. Unzip a downloaded zip archive. The directory will contain another zip archive for each county in the state. The name of the county contains 2-letters, state code, and county name. For example, il_cook.zip indicates  Cook county in the state of Illinois.
  3. Find a zip archive with the county in question and unzip it. The directory will contain a racial dot map in the ESRI Shapefile format for the selected county. The  QGIS style (dot_map_color.qml) can be used to display dot maps based on racial categories. 

Select the state name from the dropdown menu below and click "Download."

Download
 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. This means that you are free to share (copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format) and adapt (remix, transform, and build upon the material) for any purpose, even commercially, provided attribution is included (appropriate credit and a link to the license).

In addition to  Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, we request that publications and research reports employing this data include the following citation:

A. Dmowska and T. F. Stepinski (2019) Racial Dot Maps Based on Dasymetrically Modeled Gridded Population Data, Soc. Sci. 8(5), 157  paper (open access)