Data Visualization

Facilitated by Amanda Hickman - github.com/amandabee Syllabus, Cheat Sheets, etc. amandabee.github.io/CUNY-data-skills

• Reasons to want data
  • Focus on a population
  • Evidence for a claim you're making is actually true
  • Reduce harm
• When we're talking about data, we're talking about something in a spreadsheet that you can chop up and analyze and such
  • A PDF is not data yet, because it's basically a picture.
    • Tabula from Nerd Powerful is a great tool for pulling data from PDF tables
  • Charts and maps are not data because you can't really reverse engineer them
• Where to find it
  • Librarians. They live for this
  • Open data portals
    • Open data is a set of laws that governments are required to put out public data
  • Ask for sources on reports and charts that you see
    • If you see a great visualization, then you should call up the authors to try and get their data
  • Academics
    • PhD's have great data that will never be seen because they're academics and thus write unintelligibly
  • SF Indicators Project
  • Census
  • American Community Survey
  • CensusReporter.org
  • Bureau of Labor Statistics
  • Community Expenditure Survey
  • Various public health departments
  • Think tanks
  • Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) / Freedom of Information Law (FOIL)
    • Muck Rock will help you out on doing a FOIA request.
      • Check out examples of letters they've sent, and their boiler plate letters
      • They'll alert you about timeline stuff
    • There may be costs involved
    • This is kinda your last resort
    • When making a request, ask for the person who's responsible, not just a receptionist. You need someone to hold accountable
  • Geo Commons
    • Very open set of geographical data sets
    • Great for polygons like districts
  • Planning Departments
  • Cicero
    • Legislation
  • Sunlight Foundation
• Strategies for getting data and analyzing
  • If someone tells you they don't have the data, that's not the end. They can help you find it.
  • Ask for the name of their database
  • Ask for the specs of the database they're using
  • Get a lawyer if they claim that giving you data is a threat to homeland security
  • Ask for possible costs up front
  • Ask StackExchange
  • NICAR
• Working with Data
  • Provenance matters
    • Especially if you're using open data from places like Geo Commons. You need to understand where the data came from
  • Not everything should be data
• Tools
  • Hard
    • R + RStudio
    • QGIS
  • Medium
    • Carto DB
    • High Charts
    • Mapbox
    • D3
  • Easy
    • Chart Builder
  • Geo Coders
    • Texas A&M has a good tool
    • Check her site