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We’re working on building a new knowledge base, a collection of example Jupyter notebooks related to projects the Library has been working on. The notebooks include detailed analyses using Jupyter, Python, Pandas and other tools, with most of the notebooks covering crime and demographics. For instance, the Demographics and Business Loans notebooks shows how to fetch … Read more
Tonight at Downtown Works, SCALE San Diego and Open San Diego are hosting a workshop on analyzing crime data with Python, Pandas and Matplotlib. Unlike past analysis we done at the Library on San Diego Crime, this analysis uses data from the San Diego Police, rather than the whole county data from ARJIS, so it is more … Read more
Tonight we’ll be meeting to talk about two important collections of survey data, The General Social Survey (GSS) and a broad collection of integrated survey datasets, IPUMS.org. Additionally, we’ll be meeting with David Lynn, founder of Mission Driven Finance, to talk about his volunteer data project to analyze business lending to minorities in San Diego county. In … Read more
In this Hands-On presentation, we’ll be exploring social issues using two sources of microdata: The General Social Survey , a 40 year survey program that asks a representative sample of Americans questions on a huge number of social issues, and IPUMS, a curated, processed collection of international survey and census data. Using these two sources … Read more
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
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
Data analysts should always be skeptical of their data, because it very often goes bad. The Quartz bad data guide is a summary of the most common data flaws, from automatic Excel conversions to inappropriate use of Margins of Error.
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
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
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