THIS README IS FOR THE DATA/RAW_DATA/SHAPEFILES DIRECTORY.

THIS DIRECTORY CONTAINS THE SHAPEFILES DATA FOR THE CENSUS TRACTS IN THE DIFFERENT STATES AND CITY BOUNDARIES FOR LOS ANGELES, NEW YORK AND PORTLAND CITIES. THERE ARE TWO SUB-DIRECTORIES, ONE FOR THE CITY BOUNDARIES SHAPEFILES AND THE OTHER FOR THE CENSUS TRACT SHAPEFILES. THESE ARE USED TO PRODUCE THE CENSUS TRACT SHAPEFILES FOR THE CITIES THEMSELVES.

THE RAW AND MANIPULATED DATA FILES ARE NOT CONTAINED WITHIN THESE ARCHIVED FOLDERS BUT THE NECESSARY RAW DATA FOR EACH SUB-DIRECTORY CAN BE ACCESSED THROUGH AS DISCUSSED IN DataAccessInformation.pdf AS WELL AS DESCRIBED IN APPENDIX F OF MY THESIS. ALSO THE MANIPULATED DATA CAN BE CREATED THROUGH THE R FILES IN EACH RELEVANT SUB-DIRECTORY. WHILE WE DO NOT HAVE THE FILES ARCHIVED, WE  DISCUSS THE NAMING CONVENTIONS AS THEY ARE USED WITHIN THE R SCRIPTS IN THE CENSUS_TRACTS SUB-DIRECTORY.

- BOUNDARIES: this sub-directory contains the folders for the shapefiles for the city boundaries for Los Angeles, New York and Portland. As well as their use for the extraction of the relevant census tracts for each city on interest, these are also used to guide the selection of the points from the crime data that lie within the city, removing any crime associated with locations that do not lie within the city, possibly due to erroneous input.

- CENSUS_TRACTS: this contains the folders for the census tracts in different states as well as the code CensusTracts_final.R to extract the census tracts within each city as well as the census tracts within the counties that the cities lie in and the neighbourhood structure for these county census tracts for any necessary interpolation of the socio-economic variables. The outputs from these are then copied over into DATA/PROCESSED_DATA/SHAPEFILES/CENSUS_TRACTS directory for further use - within the DATA/RAW_DATA/COVARIATES in order to extract the necessary census tract variable information and for the interpolation of any missing data.