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Full count US Census

By agreement with the Minnesota Population Center the Demography Lab maintains a secure computing environment with access to digitized full count US Census data from 1790 to 1940. We offer a streamlined approval process for getting permission from MPC to use the data as well as a community of experienced users who can get you up to speed quickly. The Demography Lab server which houses the data has sufficient RAM to hold several annual census at once. The community of researchers meets about once per semester to share ideas and techniques.

Please contact

  • Leora Lawton (llawton@berkeley.edu) for general information on the data sets and access procedures
  • Josh Goldstein (josh.goldstein@berkeley.edu) for advice on specific research ideas.

Access to full census data

The full-count data is protected and not accessible directly from the outside. Rather, you access the data in a two-stage process, by first authenticating to your account on the Demography / CEDA LAN, and then by signing in again to the inner server which houses the data. Accounts on the LAN and on the special server, secureipums are separate, with different usernames and passwords.

The two most common ways of doing this are

  • NoMachine remote desktop The NoMachine remote desktop allows our network users to access our LAN remotely and to have full graphical display. A key feature is the ability to disconnect from running processes, so you can connect, launch your job, then disconnect and reconnect later to monitor progress. You would use this method if you were using Stata or the graphical XStata to work with the data.
    1. from the outside, establish a NX connection to the NoMachine Desktop, using your username.
    2. from a console window, establish connection to your account on the secureipums machine. The account on that machine is named username-ipums so you would use a command like ssh -l myusername-ipums secureipums.
  • Rstudio: the most common way of accessing the full-count data is to use the specially configured Rstudio server. You simply point your browser to fc.demog.berkeley.edu to begin. You will get a pop-up window asking you to login. In this pop-up window you enter your general Demograph/CEDA network password. If you succeed is passing this first stage, you will next see an Rstudio login window (not a popup), where you enter your username-ipums username and its password.

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