Module 6: Project Proposal

For the final project I’d really like to continue working with the Albany Census Data from 1850-1940. I’m used to working with U.S. census data for California during the nineteenth century, but have never looked at it as a digitized data set that I could manipulate into graphs and visualizations. Using the Albany census data that is already digitized makes analyzing demographics and presenting my findings much easier. For this project I’d like to look at the demographics of Sacramento County in California compared to the demographic data for Albany County in New York.

During the mid-nineteenth century, there was a fear in the West Coast over increasing Chinese immigration that was not shared among East Coast politicians. Not until the late 1870s was this fear then reproduced in eastern newspapers and spread by East Coast politicians. In an effort to understand this heightened nativism on the East Coast, I’d like to compare the demographic data and raw numbers of each capital district (even if the numbers are not always accurate).

I have requested an account with the IPUMS system that tracks and digitizes U.S. census data in order to get my hands on the California state census data in Excel form.

A few questions that I have when looking at the Albany census data and the Sacramento census data are:

A) How many people were living in these counties that were not natural born citizens, if any? If there was a population of immigrants living in these counties, where were they from?

B) What was the number of Chinese immigrants living in Sacramento County and Albany County, respectively, from 1850-1875? How many Chinese immigrants lived in these counties from 1875 on? Was there an increase in Albany County after the 1870s?

C) What type of work did these immigrants do in these counties? How many males or females lived in these counties? What percent of those with the listed gender as “male” or “female” were immigrants? How many of those immigrants, in regards to their listed gender, were from China?

I’m hoping to create some form of map of California and New York to compare my findings. If I can figure it out, I’d like to make those maps interactive and allow viewers to click on specific locations and find out how many immigrants were listed as living there and where they were from. I’d also like to include pictures of these places during the specific years of the data set to show viewers what each of these counties looked like to the people living there in those years during the nineteenth century.