Innovation Session

Innovation Session: The Most Normal State – Part 2

In January I described a project idea for finding out which state is the most normal. Tonight I will pick up where I left off.

Data Collection

I am going to start by gathering data for each of the 50 states in a CSV – I also posted it as a google doc if you want to follow along. Eventually I suspect I will have to translate this into JSON before loading it into the visualization – but this is an easy way to get started.

The first place I am going to try to get data is the US Census. Thankfully they have an API that I can use to get some population & demographic facts: http://www.census.gov/developers/

Unfortunately, the existance of an API is the only thing to get excited about. I got nowhere tonight. The US Census API is horrible to work with. I could be blind, but it took me an hour of looking to finally find a list of they API keys on another website.


Update: I never pursued this project any more – this is the end of the road for now…