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Article: Up for the count: Census Bureau continues technology tradition.(Data Collection)
- Article from:
- GEO World
- Article date:
- April 1, 2005
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2005 Bev-AL Communications, Inc. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Keeping up with new home construction in and around your own neighborhood can be tricky as developers "plop down" house after house, transforming villages into burgeoning suburbs almost overnight. But imagine that you're a census taker. It's your job to count houses and heads, and you've just stumbled on a block of houses that isn't on the paper map you use to do your job. What do you do?
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For the 2000 census, the answer was to sketch by hand the new streets and housing units encountered, scrawling on a paper map in the field. Field drawings would later be scanned, "prettied up" by U.S. Census Bureau Geography Division staffers, ...