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 […]
News
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. […]
Open Data – Everyone’s (Housing) Property (Values)
If you’ve made it here, I don’t have to tell you about the great resources Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Center (WPRDC) has made available (with excellent documentation and tutorials to boot!). I was charged with using the Market Value Analysis (MVA) data from the Urban Redevelopment Authority (URA) to analyze at sale structures and market […]
A Summer of Num(b)ers
Coming from a decidedly non-quant, non-technical background, choosing a masters program that emphasizes its data-heavy curriculum was my way of learning to swim by getting thrown in the deep-end. I’m a student at University of Pennsylvania, pursuing a masters degree in public administration with an eye towards technology policy. I’m in Pittsburgh this summer to […]
Carnegie Library Wi-Fi Usage Data Analysis
When your boss gives you a project and says to do whatever you want with it, that can give you the impression to set the bar really high. I did just that for trying to analyze the Carnegie Library Wi-Fi data. I wanted to do a super cool year-by-year visualization or a stacked bar graph that […]
Crash Course in APIs Workshop Reflection
I like using acronyms because it reminds me of texting (tbh). More than once, I’ve told professors that my essays would be more entertaining and persuasive if I was able to use emojis and the occasional “lol” in my academic writing. So when I was told we were hosting an API workshop, of course I […]