Project
References

Your requirements identification for the project will be largely driven by the overall goals, along with the reading of some background papers. See below for an annotated list of the reading.

    General

  1. US Elections Project, http://www.electproject.org/home. Contains links to sources of data.
  2. All About Redistricting. Contains a state-by-state listing of party in control and approach to redistricting.

    3. Data Formats

  3. Shapefile - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shapefile - geospatial vector data format developed and regulated by ESRI
  4. GeoJSON - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GeoJSON
  5. Coordinate systems - You can search for information on specific coordinate systems in epsg.io.

    Sources of Data

  6. Voting Equipment Database - Verified voting provides access to a database containing information about most of the voting equipment you will find in the EAVS dataset. However, many age and performance data items are missing. You will need to contact the TAs for help in accessing this material.
  7. DATA-USA contains government data, including political data.
  8. The MIT Election Data Science Lab site attempts to aggregate data from official sites, and also reports on data anomalies. For many states, it contains precinct level election result data. Unfortunately, most data is not recent.
  9. The Public Mapping Project has many references to background material, as well as links to possible data sources.
  10. The Open Elections Project
  11. A github repository that might contain useful data
  12. US Census Bureau
  13. IPUMS - A source for worldwide census data that includes US Census data.
  14. Voting Districts - US Census description of US voting districts
  15. Data.gov is a US Government resource that provides access to lots of useful data, including boundary data for Congressional districts.
  16. US Supreme Court Blog for Gill v. Witford. http://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/gill-v-whitford/. Contains links to many documents of interest in the project.
  17. MGGG (Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group) - Contains lots of relevant data.
  18. The National Historical GIS (NHGIS) contains summary statistics and GIS files for U.S. censuses and other nationwide surveys from 1790 through the present. It also contains state boundary data.

    19. Analysis/Libraries

  19. QGIS - Free and Open Source Geographic Information System
  20. Fiona - Python library for reading and writing geographic files.
  21. Shapely - Python library for geometric calculations
  22. GeoPandas - an open source project to make working with geospatial data in Python easier
  23. PYSAL - Python Spatial Analysis Library
  24. PROJ -  a generic coordinate transformation software that transforms geospatial coordinates from one coordinate reference system to another. The Python interface to PROJ is pyproj.
  25. JTS Topology Suite - an excellent Java library that can be used for geographic calculations and manipulations.
  26. A blog contains a good description of Python libraries that can be used in geometric preprocessing.
  27. Turf - A collection of JavaScript functions that process GeoJSON data.
  28. Leaflet mapping library
  29. You may find the 21 day free trial to ArcGIS Pro useful.
  30. Mapshaper - video describing a useful tool for correcting data in geometric files (e.g., non-adjacent boundary data).

    31. Algorithms

  31. When Boundaries Collide: Constructing a National Database of Demographic and Voting Statistics, Brian Amos, Michael McDonald, and Russell Watkins, Public Opinion Quarterly, Vol. 81, Special Issue, 2017, pp. 385-400. The paper provides a clear description of the issues involved in mapping census data to precincts.