4 comments
What a great idea! I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Presidents but you can always learn something new. Thanks!D G Nedelman
Thanks Deborah! I was particularly surprised to see how recently Alaska became a state.
Great stuff, Ari! That said, perhaps if you have a lot of time to improve on this a little, you could use different shapefiles per year that corresponds to state shapes. Thus for example what’s Tennessee today used be part of NC, which backed on to the Spanish Territory of Louisiana until 1790. Then it became an unorganized territory, and was so until Tennessee’s statehood and admission to the Union in 1796. The effort required to do this is, of course, pretty big… there are almost a hundred stages of territorial evolution, although you would only need the status quo at the election, whittling it down to about 35. Nonetheless, this is really great work! Congratulations!
Ps. really enjoyed your census explorer tutorial!
Chris, thanks for the thoughtful comment – and I’m glad that you enjoyed my tutorial! Do you know where I can get shapefiles of US historic boundaries by year? Even if I just posted a shiny app of the evolution over time (ignoring the voting records), I think that it would be a fun, informative app that people might enjoy playing with.