county level data in python-us

[delgadom]

Hello @jcarbaugh and everyone else at unitedstates,

Not sure if an "issue" is the right format for this, but just wanted to run this by someone before spending a bunch of time on something worthy of a pull.

Just came across the python-us repo and it looks great! I've been working on US state and county data a lot lately and have developed a number of tools very similar to those found here but at a county level. Would you be interested in seeing an expansion of this module to the county level, complete with similar data such as name, fips codes, shape files, capitals, 'is_obsolete', etc.? I have most of this data prepared and organized into objects already, and integrating it into this module could be a fun project.

If you are interested, I'd appreciate any preferences you have as to how the county data would interact with the rest of the module. For example, should each state have a list of counties within it? What sorts of methods would be useful? How should we deal with county changes? For the last point, it may be most useful to include a list of all counties in recent history and to provide multiple county groupings indexed by date, as data is frequently reported in old county formats (see https://www.census.gov/geo/reference/county-changes.html). Please feel free to message me about this - I'm very much open making this an iterative/collaborative exercise.

Thanks,

Mike Delgado

[AlJohri]

👍 related to https://github.com/unitedstates/python-us/issues/17

[jcarbaugh]

@delgadom @AlJohri sorry, I actually replied on the wrong thread. Moved my initial reply to the congressional district issue on the python-us repo: https://github.com/unitedstates/python-us/issues/17

I have a similar concern here. I know that counties change less often than congressional districts, but do you have a sense for how often they change? I'd be more inclined to follow a similar approach as congressional districts: provide a reference to a resource that has up-to-date data. This is similar to how python-us currently handles shapefiles; link to a resource, instead of having the data in the package.