CA100 Demographic Pyramid Generator

This is a project to generate visualizations specifically for California 100's regional reports. We will create 9 regional demographic pyramid visualizations using the latest year from the US Census (ACS5) data (2020).

Demographic Pyramid

A population pyramid is a common socioeconomic data visualization to understand the age and gender distribution of a geographic region.

For this project, we will generate a more detailed demographic pyramid that displays the distribution of ethnicity for each age demographic. This was inspired by this project.

How to run the generator

Pre-Requisite

1. Install Python

Description

This project has 2 ways to generate the pyramid. If you just want to generate the pyramid, please use the Hassle-Free Way. If you wish to be more interactive, understand the code, and make customizations, use the Interactive Way.

The Interactive Way is through a Jupyter notebook with descriptions of the code and its processes. If you wish to make any changes such as changing the colors or labels, please use this way.

Hassle Free Way

1. Open terminal on Mac or PC
2. Open the folder with the code in your finder
3. Follow the instructions to copy the file path of your folder
4. In your terminal, type in cd then what you copied from step 3. Example: cd /Users/danielhuang/Documents/CA100/code
5. Run python demographic_pyramid_generator.py

Interactive Way

Pre-Requisites

1. Install Python
2. Install Jupyter
3. Open terminal on Mac or PC

How to run the Notebook

The notebook is divided into "cells" of individual code.

1. Open terminal and run jupyter notebook
2. A tab should open in your browser with the url "localhost:8888". If the tab doesn't open, you can type in "localhost:8888" into the url manually.
3. Run the entire notebook by pressing the "Play" button.
4. You can run each cell by clicking the "Shift + Enter" keys.
5. Run each cell. Later cells depend on the earlier cells, so while iPython allows you to run later cells, this may result in errors.