Winner of the #DataWiz Contest!

We just wrapped up our DataWiz contest and wow, the responses definitely set the bar high. We received submissions in the form of tweets, emails, Census FIPS codes, and even original maps. It was, in a word, impressive.

In case you didn’t catch the quiz question, we asked, “What are the most racially diverse places in the U.S.?” Granted, this was an open-ended question and that was intentional on our part. We know that diversity and place can be interpreted in a number of different ways: is diversity most meaningfully measured at the scale of a neighborhood? County? City? The responses definitely reflected this variety. Some people gave the name of a neighborhood, a Census tract ID, or the name of a county.

We defined the answer as: the county containing the Census tract with the highest diversity index value and we used race and ethnicity data from the American Community Survey 2009-2013 5-year averages. The correct answer turned out to be Anchorage, Alaska, meaning that there were actually two winners: Philly’s own Jake Riley and Twitter user @bomberterp. Congratulations to you both!

Both winners will receive some classy PolicyMap swag. Extra nerd points go out to Jake for also submitting a map of the top 10 most diverse tracts and for describing his methodology. Well done!

In case you’re curious, the Census FIPS code of the most diverse tract is: 02020000901. Not far behind were tracts in Queens, NY, Pierce County, WA and Honolulu, HI.