After reviewing hundreds of 10-page term papers and feeling frustrated at the lack of subject variety easily accessible to students, Professor William Bowen, chair of the Geography Department at California State University, Northridge, and geography Professor Gene Turner, also at Northridge, created the Census Mapping Project, a CD-ROM that includes all U.S. census data from 1790 to 1987.
When they started the project in 1990, Bowen and Turner’s goal was to simplify data access by building a library of information that covered migration, religion, populations, ethnicity, age, and other census statistics. Students could pick subjects that were interesting to them and, in turn, create new projects based upon unpublished data instead of papers using conventional sources found in the library.
Bowen introduced the CD during lectures at Cal State Northridge, projecting the screen using a Macintosh SE with an overhead. The CD-ROM includes coordinates necessary for mapping the centers of all U.S. counties with information dating from 1790 to 1980. File structures were created for mapping county-level data throughout the nation’s history. The files are primarily in D-Base or ASCII text, which can be read easily by a spreadsheet program like Excel.
When Bowen taught his large California geography lecture classes, he assigned the students a project that involved choosing a new place to live in California. Using all resources available—telephone books, libraries, chambers of commerce—students made a personal assessment of their future needs. They used Macintosh computers to map 40 variables such as education, income, and rent. The project also required the use of Macintoshes for word processing in order to ensure that students gained a computer background.
Students did all mapping and word processing on the 20 Macintosh computers in the lab on their own. During the early stages of development, the problem was that the data sets were dinosaurs and the capacities of the floppies and hard disks were limited. So, the school kept the original Pluses and one 512, but upgraded them with Macintosh cxes and cis. Now there are 25 computers in the main lab, with a few others scattered throughout the campus.
Since Bowen was named the chair of the Geography Department, he teaches only the Geography 300 class, Introduction to Research Methods, with 25 students. Each student has access to a Macintosh in class for two three-hour classes a week. Throughout the semester, students write resumés, make business cards, map with Atlas Pro, use Excel for spreadsheet analysis, graph statistics with DeltaGraph, and employ Fox Base for census data acquisition. “We use most major types of software imaginable,” he says.
Recent projects mapped AIDS cases, poverty, and infant mortality rates in Los Angeles County. The work of Bowen and his students has been distributed to public libraries, school districts, the state legislature, health agencies and their interest groups.
For the future, Bowen is most interested in developing new courses, ideally providing students with both the technical skills and the academic insights they will need for the future.
Professor William Bowen can be reached at the Department of Geography, California State University, Northridge, 18111 Nordhoff St., Northridge, CA 91330; (818) 885-3532; Internet: wbowen@vax.csu.edu.
