http://digital2.library.ucla.edu/viewItem.do?ark=21198/zz001d0fwd
I took a look at archival repository of maps showing the distribution of racial and national groups in Los Angeles, according to the 1940 United States Census. From this archival collection, one can see how different racial groups were geographically divided in 1940. Each record in the archive is a separate map that focuses on a single or set of demographics. For example, one of the archives focuses on the distribution of Chinese while another on foreign born Canadians that occupied Los Angeles in 1940. From the archive one can tell that the data came from the US census data in 1940 but was not normalized until 1943 due to the time to process all of the surveys.
If I were going to write a paper based on this archive I would focus on the concentrations of certain racial groups and try to explain why certain communities center around different areas. Although it does take some work to compare each pair of graphs, there are some interesting trends in the data. The archives show that there was a dense population of Mexicans and “Negroes” (the term the census data uses) that is mostly limited to East Los Angeles. I would compare this data with data such as the distribution of foreign people born from Russian, Finland, and Lithuania which in comparison had a more evenly spread distribution across all of Los Angeles including West and Central Los Angeles. The background Los Angeles map is the same in all of the manuscripts which makes it easier to compare multiple manuscripts when side by side.
I think that the visualization of the census data can aid a report on sociology or racial tensions in the US. The manuscripts show racial segregation or even class segregation.
While I enjoyed going through the 1940 census data, I think that there is so much room for improvement in terms of how a researcher might be able to learn and interact with the data. The manuscripts are very interesting but in order to compare between different racial groups, one has to have the open side by side. I would enhance this feature by making it possible to overlay several of these manuscript charts and use different color to represent different racial groups. Also I think that if there was way to also compare the census data to that of other years, one could better understand certain migratory movements as they align with history. I would remedy this by creating some kind of slideshow option so one could compare how certain racial groups grew in size or migrated. The manuscripts themselves are already processed metadata but I think that digital humanitarians could further process this data to give it depth and greater usability.