Blog Posts

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 to peers that do similar work in other comm...

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 the most vacant building fires? Has the overdos...

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 at the Regional Data Center. The work of NNIP is supported and coordinated by...

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. The goal of the Data 101 works...

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 learn from the best, the Civic Engag...

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 strength. This dataset is a useful tool to understand...

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 compared each library month-to-month over different years. Though I am a writing major and not a computer sc...

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 had to come up with some alternate meanings for API: * A Penguin Investigator * All ...

Starting a new job is always scary, especially when you’re thrown into helping with a data mapping class first thing in the morning and set off the emergency exit alarm in the building not once, but twice. The goal: Take the class and write about my personal experience. While I had plenty of anxiety about it, I was ready for the challenge. The class was the Western Pennsylvania Regional Data Cent...

Last month, I attended the Spring, 2018 partner meeting of the National Neighborhood Indicators Partnership (NNIP) in Atlanta, Georgia. NNIP is a network of practice for community data intermediaries managed by the Urban Institute. NNIP partners in over 30 cities collect and transform neighborhood data, promote the use of data, and use information to improve the lives of people in marginalized com...