Category: xSpr14 Assignments

Exercise 2B

Posted on Author Emily Heneghan

For my Data Visualization internship I am working with Erin Kemple from Connecticut Fair Housing. This center is a statewide nonprofit organization focused on identifying impediments to fair housing in order to eliminate such barriers and advocate for change. Connecticut Fair Housing tries to find the forces at work in the market that are preventing people from getting housing. This includes whether or not various groups of people are treated differently as well as what are the differential affects of certain policies that are not necessarily discriminatory practices but result in unfair housing opportunities.

Through talking with Erin Kemple, I found out that the main Data Visualization goal is to create charts and maps to put on the web that display such impediments to fair housing so that policy makers as well as the general public become aware of such forces. An important aspect that Erin Kemple is interested in is mapping data points for zoning and racial makeup. Along we that she believes it will be very helpful to create interactive maps with filters to display various data and how-to tutorials so that website viewers have the opportunity to plug in whatever information they are interested in.

Partnering with Achieve Hartford

Posted on Author Marissa Block

Throughout the course of the semester, I will be partnering with the organization Achieve Hartford, a nonprofit education advocacy group. Fortunately, I had some exposure to this organization last semester through the Community Learning Initiative, in which I co-authored a study on the characteristics of students in the Hartford Public School (HPS) system. This past experience helped fuel my interest to work more closely with Achieve Hartford, and learn the art of data visualization in the process.

Through research, publications, and community forums, Achieve Hartford raises awareness about the state of education reform in Hartford and hopes to facilitate the engagement of parents, businesses, and community and school leaders in the process. For my role, the research and publications will be the most relevant aspect of their work. Their research is conducted in an independent and credible manner, in order to raise awareness about facts and issues affecting the HPS system. Achieve Hartford’s primary goal in terms of data visualization is to optimize their presentation of the most interesting and meaningful data by highlighting its worth through visualizations and thus making it more accessible to parents, rather than reading through an entire report.

Though I am still in the very early stages of expanding my knowledge of data visualization tools, I am certain that interactive charts  and tables will be beneficial in helping to consolidate data from several reports, possibly with achievement data of test scores. Additionally, geographical visualizations of relevant indicators will also be useful to identify any possible trends. Something as simple as an interactive map that shows the spatial distribution of Hartford schools across the four school zones in Hartford might help parents make more informed decisions about school choice.

I look forward to working with Achieve Hartford this semester and I hope to create data visualizations that will positively complement their work.

 

View Distribution of School Types in HPS in a full screen map

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Assignment 2B

Posted on Author Raymond Li

This semester, I am interning at the Injury Prevention Center at Connecticut Children’s Medical Center. The IPC is focused on educating and creating programs that will help reduce unintentional injury and violence among children, teenagers, and adults. Recently, injury prevention has gained attention within the field of public health due to the staggering amounts of injuries that happen each year. Many people believe that injuries are due to “accidents” or based on the individuals own fault, however there are many factors that can increase the risk for injury such as the environment. It is the IPC’s goal to raise awareness about injury prevention so that action can be taken to reduce these unnecessary injuries.

At the IPC, I will be helping the center by creating data visualizations based off of recent studies that have been completed. Although the research has been published, to the public’s view, the data that is presented is difficult to understand for many. Therefore, my job will be to translate the data sets that are given to me, analyze them and create visualizations that will be put up on the IPC’s website so that the public will be able to see and comprehend the work that the IPC has done. I will be working closely with Garry Lapidus, who is the director of the IPC, as well as other employees at this organization. I will also be interviewing patients, families, doctors, and other hospital personnel about injury and injury prevention that will also be put up on the website to give the data a story as well as visuals.

For the tools that I will need, it will be extremely important that I use different mapping tools, spreadsheets, as well as interactive charts and graphs that are user-friendly. Furthermore, HTML tools will be very helpful as well to put the visualization on the IPC’s website. So far I am in the preliminary stages of analysis and will hopefully be producing visualizations soon.

View Types of Schools in the Hartford Area in a full screen map

Partnership with The Connecticut Mirror

Posted on Author Minh Anh Nguyen and Minh Nguyen

We (Minh and Minh Anh) are working together on the internship with The Connecticut Mirror, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news website. First launched in 2009, The Connecticut Mirror offers an invaluable and up-to-date resource of information on various topics, including politics, economics, education, environment and health care within Connecticut. The partner we are directly working with is Alvin Chang, who is the Data Editor/CAR Specialist of The Connecticut Mirror. A professional in the field of data visualization, Alvin holds a master’s degree from New York University in interactive art and has won multiple awards from the Society of News Design and the Online News Association for his work in storytelling through interactive data.

We are working with Alvin simultaneously on two different projects. The first is a dataset on consumer complaints on financial issues, in which we focus solely on the complaints in Connecticut. The other is a dataset on the number of lottery winners across different cities in Connecticut. In both of these projects, our goals are to analyze the data, examine and answer some questions raised from the data, and finally attempt to make our answers to those questions become accessible through the means of data visualization.

In regard to visualizing the data, it is definitely helpful for us to gain basic knowledge on making interactive maps, charts and graphs, as well as to learn how to effectively present ideas in a way that is both appealing and easy to understand. Some useful and user-friendly tools, such as Google Fusion Table and Google Spreadsheet, offer us a great start in achieving our goals. We are lucky to be able to work with a data visualizing professional, so our partner wants to encourage creativity to its full extent in all of our work, instead of just limiting it to what we know.

The following is a map of all consumer complaints on financial issues in Litchfield County, Connecticut:

View Consumer Complaints in Litchfield in a full screen map