Developing Interactive Data Communication Tools
Goal:
To expand our audience by creating interactive, eye-catching, and informative renderings of our data useful to a range of education stakeholders, including parents, advocates, policymakers, and educators. We plan to start by designing small interactive tools related to individual publications. In the long run, we hope to develop a comprehensive toolkit that will make our large data collection widely accessible and useful.
Interactive data visualizations will provide meaningful information to users, and simultaneously increase the Research Alliance’s visibility.
Background:
Our unique data-sharing agreement with the NYC Department of Education provides us with a massive collection of education data not available to other researchers.
The reports that we produce contain information that is meaningful to broad audiences, but may be inaccessible to non-researchers daunted by their length and technical language. Part of our mission is to “communicate research results to broad audiences including policymakers, educators, parents, and other public education stakeholders.” In an effort to fulfill this part of our mission, we plan to complement our in-depth reports with easy to use exploration tools distilling key data for the audiences above.
For example, we are currently publishing a series of papers called The Condition of New York City High Schools, which examine trends in NYC schools from 1999-2010. Over this decade, the number of high schools in NYC has almost doubled as large high schools were closed and replaced with smaller schools. We would like to develop a map with the locations of school openings and closings over these years. Additionally, we want to display background variables such as socio-economic status of different areas, or show changes when the map is divided by zip code, city council district, census tract, etc.
Resource Needs:
We hope to create a high-quality, robust product that is user-friendly, innovative, and contains meaningful insights. We will need to find a partner who can provide the necessary technical skills, as well as expertise in information organization. In addition, we may need to purchase software, and we may need to hire staff.
We are open to applying for funding with partners, and are particularly interested in developing a work-study opportunity for a graduate student.
Current status:
Our data visualization committee is meeting with departments throughout NYU to gather expertise and find potential partners. We are developing an initial set of potential interactive projects and exploring technologies that might meet our needs.
Shonna R Keogan, sk91@nyu.edu