Platform Selection

We will be building off of the existing site. It is currently implemented as a single-page application using React and Vite.

The map is built using D3. D3 is an open-source data visualization library that allows developers to animate visualizations by connecting static data and DOM objects.

The state shapes come from us-atlas TopoJSON, which provides shapefiles based on the Census Bureau's cartography data. State boundaries are determined by merging counties, and counties can be identified by their FIPS codes.

We will continue to host the site statically on GitHub Pages (as opposed to migrating it to Vercel or other platforms) because of the client's hosting preferences and contribution concerns.

Check out the repository here, or our architecture analysis for more details.