Some system for merging with the Census SHP files

[palewire]

It would be nice to quickly be able to inspect a map of each dataset.

This could be accomplished by providing a ".csvt" companion for each processed CSV file that includes the data types in a format QGIS will respect. Then the files could be manually merged with the shapes.

Another approach would be to have the downloader, or some downstream module based on it, do the merger automatically. Such a system could create a companion shapefile for each set with the data already merged in.