Data Science will begin this semester hosting events (tentatively one in fall, one in spring) inviting people in Wayne County government, United Way, and other local groups to send representatives to Earlham to pose questions to us that can be answered with data. From there we would spend a couple of days making that happen and, ideally, deliver answers to them.
This can be part of a broader trend. Already cities in the US and Europe are making an effort to be data-driven: gathering and looking at numbers about residents and visitors in order to make institutions more responsive to public needs. In other words, if this works, it’s exportable.
Project members: Craig Earley, Thu Pham, faculty adviser Charlie Peck. All Data Science group involved in more general way.
This is our main notes Post. There will be still others going forward.
A lot of detail below the jump.
Resources
Note: this is our initial list of data. It is incomplete, at best. No guarantee any of it’s perfect. Part of our job will be to investigate.
Census
- Datasets page
- TIGER data
- American Community Survey site
- Product catalog
- Factfinder search
Resources – General
- General Social Survey data
- Outstanding page of Census data from the Census’s Opportunity Project, including links to Indianapolis data
Resources – Indiana
- STATS Indiana: From end of page: “STATS Indiana is the statistical data utility for the State of Indiana, developed and maintained since 1985 by the Indiana Business Research Center at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business. Support is or has been provided by the State of Indiana and the Lilly Endowment, the Indiana Department of Workforce Development and Indiana University.”
- State Data Center: “In 1978, the State Data Center (SDC) Program began as a cooperative agreement between the states and the U.S. Census Bureau. State Data Centers assist the Census Bureau by disseminating Census and other federal statistics.”
- IndianaMAP: GIS data
- Statistics by Topic in Indiana
- Indiana Lidar Survey data
- Indiana Soil Survey data
- Central Indiana datasets (may or may not have useful resources for Richmond) from data.indy.gov
Resources – Wayne County and Richmond
- Wayne County GIS, plus Beacon site to allow access sans IE
- e911 link, plus here to search by street address for 911 calls
- cluttered My Neighborhood Update map, and this one
- crime map/community policing is one possible project
- Economic Development Corporation: Data includes demographics, education, taxes, employers, cost of living and others
- American Community Survey – Richmond files
- American Community Survey – Wayne County files
- Waynet
Possible contact person: Ava Stewart, VP of Institutional Advancement, with Board of Community Advisers
Data Dive Events Elsewhere
Turns out other people have tried this, and they may have some insight. They call them Data Dives.
These events often go by the name of Data Dives. Typically they’re two-day events, and they do everything we’ve talked about doing, with the end goal of using data science for social good.
A few places that have done it:
- DataKind runs DataDive events in several cities in the U.S., Europe, and Asia.
- The University of Michigan in Ann Arbor has organized the A2DataDive several times since 2012.
- Carlson Library at the University of Rochester hosted another.
- UChicago Data Science for Social Good http://dssg.uchicago.edu/
- Course with data event as a conclusion http://www.mccormick.northwestern.edu/news/articles/2015/06/northwestern-students-hack-data-for-social-good.html
These events have all involved non-profits. A local government should be pretty easy to include as well.