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Urban Institute

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Data@Urban’s Top Posts of 2022

Choosing the right OCR service for extracting text data → Read More

How We Designed a User-Friendly Web Data Connector

The Urban Institute’s Education Data Portal contains a vast amount of information and pulls data from varied sources, features that offer immense potential to our users but can also be extremely… → Read More

How can data communicators lead inclusivity efforts for visualizations?

Following the June 2021 release of our Do No Harm Guide on how to take an equitable and inclusive approach to data communication, my coauthor Alice Feng and I have presented our work at numerous… → Read More

Three Lessons for Measuring Rural Strengths

How do we describe rural America based on its strengths? Instead of focusing on traditional, deficit-based measures like poverty, population loss, and unemployment, Urban researchers wanted to… → Read More

Data@Urban’s Top 5 Posts of 2021

Although researchers have developed an alternate method for comparing food insufficiency datasets from before and after the pandemic, three graphing tactics could more effectively visualize the… → Read More

Creating Better, More Informative Map Legends in R

For many geography-oriented projects, maps have become the default vehicle for data visualization. But maps aren’t always the best way to visualize geographic data. Yes, they are familiar to people… → Read More

Introducing the Spatial Equity Data Tool Version 2

About one year ago, we launched the Spatial Equity Data Tool to respond to demand from city officials and local practitioners for tools that would enable them to more easily incorporate equity into… → Read More

10 Things a Good Chart Communicates

Like a growing number of organizations, the Urban Institute maintains a style guide for data graphics. This guide specifies almost a dozen elements that should appear on charts, like axis labels and… → Read More

Challenges for Women Working in Tech

Last year I, along with a few colleagues from the Urban Institute’s Technology and Data Science team, participated in a Data@Urban digital discussion about women in tech. Though the topic was… → Read More

Building Summary Endpoints for the Education Data Portal

Last year, we announced our collaboration with the Cloudera Foundation to accelerate our progress toward a vision of providing free and open access to high-quality education data for a diverse set of… → Read More

How We Wrote Our (Updated) Data Policy for the Education Data Portal

The Urban Institute Education Data Portal offers open, free access to education data from a number of data sources in one place, with the goal of making it easier for researchers, practitioners, and… → Read More

Applying Racial Equity Awareness in Data Visualization

The following post is a summarized version of the article accepted to the 2020 Visualization for Communication workshop as part of the 2020 IEEE VIS conference to be held in October 2020. The full… → Read More

Pivoting Community Engagement during COVID-19

The Urban Institute is focusing its efforts to support effective responses, resilience, and recovery for those most negatively affected by COVID-19. We can do that through lifting up lessons from… → Read More

Data@Urban Digital Discussions

The COVID-19 pandemic is effecting how we work and communicate with each other. Many of us are accustomed to walking down the hall and chatting with a colleague or friend. We get together for lunch… → Read More

How to Start a Podcast for Your Organization: A Seven-Step Guide­­­

Urban’s communications team is always on the lookout for new messaging platforms to spread news about our work and elevate the debate. In January 2018, we took a big leap to a new platform —… → Read More

Democratizing Big Data Processing for the Education Data Portal

Earlier this year, we announced our plan to create a central source of preprocessed, big, local datasets spanning various sectors and issues. Our long-term goal is to make it easier for people to… → Read More

Data@Urban’s Top 5 Posts of 2019

It’s that time of year again! As we approach silver white winters that melt into spring (and a new decade), the Data@Urban team is taking time to look back at some of our most engaging posts from… → Read More

Three Things We Learned from Cleaning One Million DMV Property Records

The DC, Maryland, and Virginia (DMV) region is facing a housing crisis. According to the Urban Institute’s report on the future of housing in the region, policymakers will need to preserve, produce… → Read More

Back to Basics: Building a Successful Outreach Campaign on Good Data and a Personal Touch

As a communications team, we regularly engage stakeholder audiences around research that provides specific findings or recommendations. But this past year, we were faced with a new challenge: would… → Read More

How to Create State and County Maps Easily in R — Part 2

Geospatial analysis and mapping are some of the fastest growing applications of the R programming language. Talented developers are making regular updates to key R packages, such as sf and ggplot2… → Read More