Prelude: The United States of America
This is a map of the entire United States. Hawaii is inset in the bottom left corner; Alaska is inset in the bottom right corner.
Demographer Dustin Cable plotted on a map dots for each of the 308,745,538 people represented in the 2010 United States census. He also color-coded those dots based on self-reported ethnicity.
In this map, you can identify geographic distribution, population denesity and ethnic diversity. The data used to plot the points on this map comes from the 2010 U.S. census, which is publicly available online. Cable, a researcher at the the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service, modeled the project on a previous Massachusetts Institute of Technology effort plotting population density with dots that represent individuals. Here, he takes it one further by color-coding the dots for self-reported ethnicity.
Key: One dot equals one person. Blue dots represent a reported "White" ethnicity; green dots represent "Black"; red dots represent "Asian"; orange dots represent "Hispanic" or Latino; brown dots represent "Native American," "multi-racial" and "other."
To zoom in on an area not included here, visit the interactive version hosted by the Cooper Center.