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. All About Redistricting. Contains a state-by-state listing of party in control and approach to redistricting.
  2. US Supreme Court Blog for Louisiana v. Callais. Contains links to many documents of interest in the project.

    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. MGGG (Metric Geometry and Gerrymandering Group) - Contains lots of relevant data.
  7. DATA-USA contains government data, including political data.
  8. The Open Elections Project
  9. US Census Bureau
  10. IPUMS - A source for worldwide census data that includes US Census data.
  11. Voting Districts - US Census description of US voting districts
  12. Data.gov is a US Government resource that provides access to lots of useful data, including boundary data for Congressional districts.
  13. 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.

    14. Analysis/Libraries/Tools

  14. QGIS - Free and Open Source Geographic Information System
  15. Fiona - Python library for reading and writing geographic files.
  16. Shapely - Python library for geometric calculations
  17. GeoPandas - an open source project to make working with geospatial data in Python easier
  18. PYSAL - Python Spatial Analysis Library
  19. PROJ -  a generic coordinate transformation software that transforms geospatial coordinates from one coordinate reference system to another. The Python interface to PROJ is pyproj.
  20. Leaflet mapping library
  21. You may find the 21 day free trial to ArcGIS Pro useful.
  22. Mapshaper - video describing a useful tool for correcting data in geometric files (e.g., non-adjacent boundary data).

    23.