On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 4:01 PM, Paul Gronke <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> I have a senior writing a thesis who would like to track changing patterns
> of campaign donations.  He's interested in replicating and extending Michael
> Malbin's work on how patterns of donations have changed over the past few
> cycles.
>
> I would like him to attach Census demographic information to the FEC
> campaign donations dataset (actually, he's downloaded these from open
> secrets).
>
> I am not familiar with how you attach a Census tract or block identifier to
> an address, and if this can be done in a relatively straightforward (and not
> overly expensive) way.  The student is fairly adept with Stata but not
> tremendously so.  This is something I'm not averse to learning myself, but I
> am hoping to find an off the shelf solution, or perhaps someone that has
> already done with with the 2008, 2004, and 2000 files and might be willing
> to share a dataset.

I believe Microsoft MapPoint is capable of geocoding addresses to
coordinates which you can then match to census tracts; you can also do
it (a bit more clunkily, because you'll have to import the Census and
map data yourself) using ESRI's ArcGIS.  Reed may have someone in
geology or geography who has a license already for one of these
packages.  Or your student may be able to accomplish what he needs
with the trial versions of these packages.

In theory you could do this with open source software.  In practice
it'd be no fun at all today - the biggest challenge is you'd need to
kludge together your own geocoder for Census TIGER data to find
address coordinates (all the services that geocode for you have prices
for batch processing); you could then use PostGIS to select from the
census tract geometry and extract the relevant data fairly easily.
OpenStreetMap ain't there yet, alas... maybe in a year or two.  See
e.g. http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/TIGER#Addressing_Data


Chris
-- 
Christopher N. Lawrence, Ph.D. <[log in to unmask]>
Assistant Professor of Political Science
Texas A&M International University
313 LBVSC, 5201 University Blvd
Laredo, Texas 78041-1920

Website: http://www.cnlawrence.com/

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