CEN Data Browsing

Discussion

As of March 31, 2020, the U.S. Census AFF (American Fact Finder) site is no longer offered by the Bureau. This means that there is no longer a tool at the Census site to browse for data in a repeatable manner, and therefore dataZoa cannot use its typical dz-Dot method for drag-and-drop data access to the data that was served served by AFF. Essentially, the traditional human pathways to the AFF data no longer exist. There are human-oriented search tools at the Census that will use their API to navigate and find data values for you, but they do not provide the locations of the values such that you can revisit the same data.

To keep this valuable information available and current in dataZoa, there is a tool at dataZoa.com that lets you browse that data and then commit it (and its location!) to your dataZoa account so that it can stay up to date and grow over time, in the manner of all other dataZoa sources.

Select Parameters to Browse Data section

In this section you are drilling down to data of interest by gradually tightening specifications until a single, repeatable fact is resolved. The selection fields proceed from top to bottom. As you make selections, the page interacts with the Census.gov API every step of the way to determine what then choices should be for the next level down. The choices and also the types of choices are very much path-dependent.

The first few choices are similar in structure:

• Survey offers a list of supported census surveys, extensively [documented here https://www.census.gov/programs-surveys/surveys-programs.html]. dataZoa covers only the most important Surveys, but more are added from time to time.
• Year dynamically shows all of the years offered for the selected Survey.
  A note of caution about the latest year shown: Its Survey data can can be a sparse or volatile "work in progress," so you may want to select a prior year for more stable results!

Data Comparison Columns section

When all of parameters are selected, you do a trial data fetch and examine the results. You can tweak parameters if needed and re-fetch. When you are satisfied that the trial fetch is right for the data series, you can Accept the Parameters and Commit to dataZoa.

The three data comparison columns show:

• The legacy Current data for this Series as stored at dataZoa.
• The proposed Trial data for this Series as it will be fetched with the current parameters.
  • Hover over the Current URL row to see the raw legacy data path.
  • Hover over the Current Title row to see the full description of the legacy data.
• An optional Raw Fetch direct from the data source, with minimal processing, to help resolve any subtleties about the data as stored at the source.