A couple of News Journal colleagues and I drove to American University in Washington, D.C., yesterday for an IRE workshop on the census. It was a long day (up at 5 a.m. and home about 9:30 p.m.), but it was a good trip.
I already knew a lot of the nuts and bolts of the census release. But I picked up several useful tips about the questions on the American Community Survey, the use of margins of error and some of the features on American FactFinder. It's all going to come in handy in a couple of months when the data start rolling in.
The last couple of hours of the workshop were spent talking about story ideas that we can do from the ACS and the Census 2010 data. I filled a sheet of paper with possible ideas, which I hope to tick off over the next several months. Maybe I won't get to all of them, but I'll try.
Several times during the day, I had the feeling I had seen this whole movie before. I remember sitting in a lecture hall at, I think, University of Maryland almost exactly 10 years ago and learning a lot of the same things. Back then, we were all obsessed with what to do with the multi-race question. In the end, it turned out to be only a minor issue because fewer than 2 percent of the population checked off more than one race. It will probably be a higher percentage this time around, though.
Gonna be fun.
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