Education

Data Day 2009

Conference a great success!
By Terry Dolan

On Wednesday, July 15, 2009, over 350 researchers, community activists, municipal officials, and non-profit representatives convened at Northeastern's Curry Center and fanned out to computer labs all across campus in search of one thing: data. More data. Better data. New ways to obtain and display data. New uses for data. How others are using data.

Data Day, a day-long conference, co-sponsored by the Policy School, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC), and the Boston Foundation was designed to meet their needs.

Following Dean Barry Bluestone's keynote address on "The Economic Crisis and Urban Neighborhoods" two plenary sessions and 14 separate workshops offered participants the opportunity to listen to, and ask questions of, experts who use data daily to provide information that can drive community and public policy change. Among the most popular sessions were the hand-on demonstrations of free on-line data sources, including those of the U. S. Census Bureau, the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, the Boston Indicators Project website, and MAPC's MetroBoston DataCommon. "It's all about the data, and the data tools," said conference attendee Deborah Gray from the Boston Public School's (BPS) Office of Family and Student Engagement. "We're trying to promote family engagement, as research has demonstrated that when parents are involved, kids succeed. How can we better use data to show the results of our efforts?" She indicated a new focus on objectives, outcomes and metrics at BPS and was excited by the workshop on free web tools. "And it was terrific to hear what others were doing with data. I made some great connections today!"

Meg Flanagan, a fundraiser with the Dorchester Bay Economic Development Corporation, found the hands-on session using the U.S. Census Bureau site very helpful. "You use a tool, but you come to a session like this and get all sorts of great tips and new ways of using the data. Solid data, well presented, helps us make the case to funders, donors and prospective businesses on the value of the work we are doing" she said. "For us it's all about creating jobs in the community, and in this economy especially, the stronger our case the better."

Powerpoints from sessions and archived video from the webcast can be found on MAPC's website.

"Free Web Tools to Analyze Data and Create Maps"
Workshop Review by Dan Drazen

One of the Data Day's best-attended interactive workshops was "Free Web Tools to Analyze Data and Create Maps," presented by MAPC's Manisha Bewtra. The session introduced the audience of more than 50 people to a series of websites that enable users to create graphical materials, including maps, charts and visual displays, at no cost. Before delving into the capabilities of each website, Ms. Bewtra underscored the role that graphics can play within a document or digital media. She emphasized how visuals can complement and enhance text by showing the spatial relationship between data points, while warning that cluttered or confusing graphics can often do more harm than good.

Ms. Bewtra's started her presentation by talking about Google Maps, explaining how users can add points, lines, shapes and even images to a Google basemap. She also touched on the Google Earth, the three-dimensional equivalent of Google Maps, which can produce maps of downtown buildings heights as well as historic aerial maps. The next web tool that was presented, Many Eyes, is a data visualization site where visitors upload data and produce charts, graphs and even a "wordle," a diagram showing how often words are used in a document.

The final website, Socrata, is more of a database than a graphic development tool. Socrata is essentially the Wikipedia of data sets, a site where anyone came come to either upload or download data. Ms. Bewtra concluded by recommending that individuals who don't have Microsoft Excel should consider trying Google Spreadsheets, which has a fairly sophisticated set of data analysis and visualization tools.