Computer Vision For Greater Good!

Use your Computer Vision skills to tackle homelessness. The Data Library is currently running a data project to convert 5 years of monthly homelessness person locations from scanned paper maps to a geographic dataset. The bulk of the work involves volunteers manually digitizing 350 scanned paper maps in two jobs, but we have enough data … Read more

Exploring San Diego Homelessness

Over the past few months, the Data Library has been involved in several projects to study homelessness in San Diego. The main projects have been: Digitizing 5 years of monthly homelessness counts for Downtown San Diego. Building a collection of data about homeless issues for San Diego and Los Angeles. Last Spring, we got the … Read more

Mission Driven Credit Analysis

We’re excited to announce the first of our next round of social data projects. Mission Driven Finance is a San Diego impact investment fund that provides loans to nonprofits, social enterprises, and businesses that benefit the San Diego community.  MDF is interested in helping businesses understand the regional lending landscape and advocating for improvements to make … Read more

Pro Bono Data Analysis This Summer

For Summer of 2017, The San Diego Regional Data Library will be running a data internship program, working on pro-bono data analysis projects for nonprofits, governments and journalists in San Diego County. If your organization has questions that can be answered with data, you can have an undergraduate data analyst work on your project, with … Read more

Age-Friendly Communities

Consumer Advocates for RCFE Reform (CARR) works to improve the quality of  residential care facilities for the elderly (RCFE)  by making public RCFE records and reports easier to find, search and understand. This recent article in Senior Housing and Care Journal provides an excellent introduction to the data issues involved in reviewing these facilities, as does … Read more

Age Friendly Communities Project

At tomorrow night’s meeting, we’ll be kicking off two new data projects. The first is the Health Food Access project, previously announced, and the second is the Age Friendly Communities project, for which we’ve just posted the project page. In this project we will be collecting data to analyze the capacity and affordability of San Diego’s assisted … Read more

Wrangling Data For Social Projects

Next week we’ll be kicking off two new data projects, and a big part of these projects will be finding data, documenting it, and preparing it in a consistent way for analysis, a process known as data wrangling. I’ve been developing software for wrangling social data for a few years, and have collected many of … Read more