ABSTRACT
This chapter gives a flavour of new cartographic techniques which can be used to study census data. Techniques used to study differences between many small places which often require colour are the paper's main focus. What makes the census particularly valuable for social science is not the breadth or depth of the questions that it asks (as they are few and shallow), but the great spatial detail that is provided, showing how each neighbourhood, each block of streets, each hamlet, differs socially from its neighbours (for every place in the country simultaneously). The finest level of output of the 1991 census spatially is the 'enumeration district' in England and Wales and the 'output area' in Scotland. For the 1981 census, digital boundaries were available only for wards, of which there were 9,289 in England and Wales and into which enumeration districts were nested.
