Introduction Allegheny County recently made two notable datasets related to health available as open data. Allegheny County is able to access data through the Pennsylvania Vital Statistics Database. The Commonwealth’s Department of Health collects data on births and deaths by place of residence for all of these events in Pennsylvania. Births occurring over a five-year period […]
News
Measuring “Walkability”
Introduction We’ve been asked to create measures of communities that are “walkable” for several projects. While we acknowledge that there is no standard definition of what makes a community “walkable,” and the definition of “walkability” can differ from person to person, we thought developing an indicator that explores the total length of available sidewalks and […]
Measuring reinfections in COVID-19 data
We’re now into the 22nd month of the pandemic, and it is becoming more-common for people to have experienced multiple COVID-19 infections. The Pennsylvania Department of Health (DOH) recently made some changes to the data feed provided to the Allegheny County Health Department making it possible to identify characteristics of people experiencing a COVID-19 infection. […]
Exploring Housing Sales Data
We’ve been thinking about community indicators quite a bit lately thanks to several current projects and recent data requests we’ve received. As part of this work, we recently pulled property transactions for one and two unit properties (Note #1) shared by Allegheny County, and linked them with property assessment data to append property characteristics to […]
Behavioral Design and the Air Quality Dashboard
Air pollution in Pittsburgh has come a long way since the days when smoke could blot out the midday sun. Yet for many in the region, clean air remains a concern. Following the Christmas Eve fire at Clairton Coke works, the Allegheny County Health Department approached CountyStat about developing a new dashboard to make the […]
How We Published Data about Pittsburgh Parking Transactions
We at the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center have been working in partnership with the Pittsburgh Parking Authority and the City of Pittsburgh to shed light on how people in Pittsburgh use on-street meters and surface parking lots operated by the Authority. Developing a better understanding of how people park can help support efforts by […]
NNIP Milwaukee Recap
Since 2008, the Center for Social and Urban Research has been the Pittsburgh partner of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP), a peer learning network of community data intermediaries. The work of NNIP is supported and coordinated by the Urban Institute, and there are partners in over 30 cities. It’s critical to our work to be connected […]
911 Dispatch Data Cleaning
Ever since WPRDC was launched as our Pittsburgh-area open data portal, 911 call and dispatch data has been one of the most requested datasets. And no wonder: by looking at the time and location of different types of emergencies, community members, researchers, nonprofits and others can answer important questions about their community. What areas have […]
Los Angeles NNIP Partner Meeting Recap
It’s critical to our work to be connected to peers that do similar work in other communities. These interactions both give us new ideas and also enable us to share more about what we’ve learned here in our community. The National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) is the network that is most important to our work […]
Data 101 Toolkit
Data 101 is an introductory data workshop series designed for people looking to get started on their journey toward data literacy. The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center developed the set of workshops after testing a variety of formats with different audiences and in different locations throughout the Pittsburgh region. […]