[GRASSLIST:5810] Simple plotting of variables in census blocks/tracts?

[Matej Cepl]

Hi,

I am total newbie both in GRASS as well as in GIS (but I have
plenty experience with Linux). I am a PhD student of
interdisciplinary studies of law (basically law & society) and
I begun my work on thesis related to the community analysis of
the black community here in Boston, MA. I would love to be able
to create couple of maps for displaying different variables in
the map of Boston and some neighboring cities. An example of what
I would like to achieve is on
http://www.volny.cz/cepls/tmp/FullMealSupportSussex.eps.gz
(created with ArcMap).

The idea is basically to create maps displaying variables for
inidividual census tracts/blocks/groups of tracts by something
like JOIN of ArcMap by number of census district.

I searched Google, I have borrowed (and am in the process of
studying) of Neteler/Matisova, 2002, but I still cannot find
certain answers to the following questions:

1) How to import census data (is v.in.tig.basic and
   v.apply.census everything I need)?
2) From reading of the book I got an impression, that closest to
   what I need are sites, but they seem to able to work with data
   attached to one point not to a rectangle with some ID (how it
   would be attached). Am I right?
3) In order to overcome previous problem (if there is a problem
   with attaching values to rectangles) do I have to use
   PostgreSQL (I hope not -- I really do not feel up to
   management of the real big SQL server)? I do not expect to
   make any large-scale calculations with GRASS (all data should
   be pre-prepared outside of GRASS), I hope to be able to create
   a script which would create table from the GRASS maps and two
   column text table (one column ID of tract/block/something and
   other one with the value to be displayed), which would be
   prepared in gnumeric, R, or wherever.
4) Is GRASS the best application for me, or it is overkill?

Could anybody answer these questions and/or suggest some
beginners' tutorial to do this?

   Thank you very much in advance,

      Matej

-- 
Matej Cepl,
Finger: 89EF 4BC6 288A BF43 1BAB  25C3 E09F EF25 D964 84AC
138 Highland Ave. #10, Somerville, Ma 02143, (617) 623-1488
 
Give your heartache to him. (1Pt 5,7; Mt 11:28-30)