theportus / wikidata-historic-state-populations

SPARQL Query of Wikidata for US historical state population and Python processing to estimate unknown years

wikidata-historic-state-populations

Estimated population for every US state between 1600-2018

Uses a Wikidata SPARQL query (based off an example of national populations from Wikidata) to grab known historic US state population data between 1600-2018. Then, uses a Python script to ROUGHLY estimate population for every year between known data points.

Intended to be used in combination with other kinds of historic data sets, such as crime data for obtaining some kind of historical per-capita measurement.

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David J. Thomas, thePortus.com
Instructor of Ancient History and Digital Humanities,
Department of History,
University of South Florida

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To Use (Easiest)

Either...

1. Use the raw results of the WikiData query from 1_wikidata_query_results.csv, OR...
2. Use the complete estimated population results for every state and year from 2_wikidata_processed_results.csv

To Run

1. Copy the query from the data_files/1_query_wikidata.rq file
2. Head to Wikidata Query, paste the query, run the query
3. Save the file in this directory
4. Run the python script in this directory python 2_process_data.py -i INPUT_PATH -o OUTPUT_PATH replacing INPUT_PATH with the name of your saved Wikidata results and OUTPUT_PATH with whatever you would like to save the file as
5. Use the saved results with full yearly population for your data needs