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
The Library has been quiet lately, mostly because the Director doesn’t have time to properly manage projects, and because he’s not very good at it. So, we’d like to find a volunteer to manage projects. This is a volunteer role that would involve: Talking to nonprofits and journalists about data needs Recruiting other volunteers for data … Read more
Collect and analyze data about the food system in San Diego county. The San Diego Food System Alliance’s Healthy Food Access Working Group is developing an indicator library to analyze food access issues, and we need your help to locate datasets, wrangle them into useable shape, and create visualizations. The work is similar to the topics … Read more
Collect and analyze data about the food system in San Diego county. The San Diego Food System Alliance’s Healthy Food Access Working Group is developing an indicator library to analyze food access issues, and we need your help to locate datasets, wrangle them into useable shape, and create visualizations. The work is similar to the topics … Read more
To announce the arrival of a new set of crime data, our next meetup will be a mini data contest, with a $100 prize for the best student analysis. In this meeting, we will present the new Crime Incident dataset and talk about how to link it to other social datasets. After the presentation, we’ll … Read more
When we last requested crime data from SANDAG, 3 years ago, it took four months of negotiation to get them to admit they could produce it, and two more months to get the price down to a reasonable amount. Last week when I requested an update, I got one clarification email, then a phone call, … Read more
The Data Library works primarily with journalists and nonprofits, but until recently, I hadn’t fully realized how different the processes are in these two environments. We’d been following two different processes, but didn’t have names for them, so it is worthwhile to give the two contexts names, so we can be sure we are working in a process … Read more