Tag: Data Visualization

A school “colocation” occurs when two or more public schools share the same school building or campus. They have long been a part of the city’s public schools, but increased rapidly under the Bloomberg and subsequent administrations, mirroring the rise of charter schools and the small schools movement.

In this session, we present a look at the state of colocations in our schools through the lens of open data. We look at colocations from the perspective of changing neighborhood demographics represented in US Census data, as well as school demographic and academic data gathered from NYC Open Data datasets. We consider how and when schools thrive as colocations and when they suffer or present inequities.

During our presentation, we will discuss the background and driving questions for our research and our findings, but we will also demonstrate our methods and approach (and code) used to work with open geospatial data.

We follow our presentation with a workshop demonstrating new ways to plot overlapping spaces on data driven maps using the Python programming language. Our team will work with participants to code their own maps that investigate various aspects of school buildings and colocations. Participants of all levels are welcome.

Annually, NYC community-based organizations and the City government work to supply millions of pounds of food directed toward people in need through the Community Food Connection Program. Determining how to distribute limited resources to where they are needed the most, the City leverages data-driven approaches to bring food to those in need using the Supply Gap Analysis. In this workshop, you’ll learn how data insights can shape decision-making, collaboration and support organizers like you to make more informed decisions that facilitate food security for our communities.

Led by the NYC Mayor’s Office of Food Policy, this session will include guests from the Mayor’s Office for Economic Opportunity & Community Food Connection Administrators, whose work supports over 700 food pantries and soup kitchens across the city, leveraging insights from the supply gap analysis in areas of unmet need.

Ideal for food security advocates, academics, students, data analysts and others interested in food-related issues and data, the workshop will provide answers to questions about neighborhood food security metrics, how need for emergency food is defined and measured, and how to leverage the dataset to support neighborhood and/or organizational strategies to close the gap. You will have a chance to interact with the Emergency Food Supply Gap dataset using NYC Open Data tools to pose your own strategic insights to support food security.

Data Through Design 2025: Corpus, Bodies of Data Opening Reception

Data Through Design (DxD) is an independent, volunteer-run collective which organizes an annual art exhibition that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available on NYC Open Data. Each year a theme is developed to challenge artists to surface hidden stories, patterns, and connections in data; to examine its shortcomings; and to question claims to objectivity that data representations may project. These novel and artistic creations harness the potential for data to enliven and deepen our understanding of life in the city.

The exhibition will be presented in partnership with BRIC in Brooklyn, NY and is open to the public daily from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. Learn more at datathroughdesign.com.

RSVP for the March 21 opening reception.

This year, DxD asked artists to think about the concept of a corpus, or body of data, that can be physical or ephemeral. We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives? For DxD’s 2025 exhibition, we encouraged participating artists to consider “corpus” through its multiple meanings, such as a body, a dataset, a community, and/or an organism.

2025 Artists and Projects
Elias Bennett, Simon Lesina-Debiasi: Final Inch: Mustard, Data, Sauerkraut
Mauricio Delfin: The Timelines Project
HK Dunston, Jill Sigman, Abigail Regner, Mariya Chekmarova: Breath Atlas
Michelle Hui: Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
Alison Long, Cass Yao, Keyarow Mosley: Body of Waste
Matías Piña, Arden Schager: Hyperphagia
Natch Quinn: The Entirety of NYC Land
Nishra Ranpura: Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC
Aida Razavilar, Paul Hanna: Tower of Babel: Bodies of Language in Lexicon
Jessica Reisch: Marsh Temporalities

DXD Corpus: Bodies of Data

Data Through Design (DxD) is an independent, volunteer-run collective which organizes an annual art exhibition that creatively analyze, interpret and interrogate data made available on NYC Open Data. Each year a theme is developed to challenge artists to surface hidden stories, patterns, and connections in data; to examine its shortcomings; and to question claims to objectivity that data representations may project. These novel and artistic creations harness the potential for data to enliven and deepen our understanding of life in the city. The exhibition will be presented in partnership with BRIC in Brooklyn, NY and is open to the public daily from 12 p.m. to 7 p.m. Learn more at datathroughdesign.com.

This year, DxD asked artists to think about the concept of a corpus, or body of data, that can be physical or ephemeral. We imagine a dataset as a body of knowledge that indexes people in a community, events in a timeline, or observations in an area. But datasets are also representations of our bodies and the corpora of living things; collections of individuals, bodies of water, natural and human-made systems, the collectivity of the city. How are these bodies of knowledge born, how do they age, grow, and go through cycles – who animates them and do they expire? And, if we look closely enough, can we discern the shapes of individuals within these collectives? For DxD’s 2025 exhibition, we encouraged participating artists to consider “corpus” through its multiple meanings, such as a body, a dataset, a community, and/or an organism.

2025 Artists and Projects
Elias Bennett, Simon Lesina-Debiasi: Final Inch: Mustard, Data, Sauerkraut
Mauricio Delfin: The Timelines Project
HK Dunston, Jill Sigman, Abigail Regner, Mariya Chekmarova: Breath Atlas
Michelle Hui: Aging Out of Place: Chinatown Elderly
Alison Long, Cass Yao, Keyarow Mosley: Body of Waste
Matías Piña, Arden Schager: Hyperphagia
Natch Quinn: The Entirety of NYC Land
Nishra Ranpura: Tapestreet: The Fabric of NYC
Aida Razavilar, Paul Hanna: Tower of Babel: Bodies of Language in Lexicon
Jessica Reisch: Marsh Temporalities

New York City agencies create and publish a huge volume of geospatial data each year. They use Geographic Information Systems (GIS) – computer-based tools to store, visualize, and analyze this geographic data. This panel will review publicly-available tools and datasets, discuss the state of GIS technology in the city, and consider how the City uses geospatial data to serve NYC residents.
Join this conversation with agency GIS leaders about new maps & tools, geospatial data, and initiatives for 2025.

Moderator – Lee Ilan, NYC Mayor’s Office of Environmental Remediation
Panelists –
Josh Friedman, NYC Emergency Management
Matt Croswell, NYC Department of City Planning

Sandwiches are my passion. When the New York Times unveiled its list of 57 sandwiches that define New York City, I wanted to try them all. The problem: the NYT list only provides sandwich names and restaurant addresses. Determining if I’m near an iconic sandwich requires scrolling, reading, and flipping between the list and Google Maps. The solution: I need a sandwich map!

In this workshop, we will develop a shareable, interactive, web-based sandwich map using basic Python coding, Google Maps, and GitHub pages.

The Health Department provides interactive visualization tools, downloadable
datasets and rigorous research on New Yorkers’ health. Learn how to use these resources to support your own research, and to
inform advocacy, programming, and policy.

Resources covered include:
EpiQuery
Environment and Health Data PortalCommunity Health Profiles
NYC Open Data datasets from the Health Department
Data pages on Covid-19 and Vital Statistics

Join F.Y.Eye, a NYC-based nonprofit media agency that works with nonprofit clients, to explore how to harness the power of data to create powerful Public Service Announcements (PSAs). Learn about the importance of information access, how to identify relevant datasets, and craft impactful narratives that resonate with your target audience. We’ll cover practical strategies for transforming raw data into powerful messages that drive social change and amplify your organization’s mission. This event is for anyone curious about the power of combining data insights with compelling storytelling to amplify messages for the public good.

Launched in 2022 as a collaboration between the Queens Memory Project at Queens Public Library and Urban Archive, the Queens Name Explorer is an interactive map with biographical profiles and personal remembrances spanning more than 1,200 places in the borough of Queens. Drawing on data from NYC’s Department of Parks, Department of Transportation, and others, the project offers a user-friendly way to explore local history, from looking up people by name or characteristics (such as by roles like musicians, activists, and politicians), “touring” a neighborhood and clicking on profiles, and using the information on the map to consider how practices of commemoration include and exclude individuals, communities, and their stories.
In this session, participants will gain insight into how civic data sources, original research, and public contributions can be used to highlight local history through creative approaches to personal biography.
Following this introduction, participants will be guided through a series of prompts to think about how named places can be a starting point for further explorations into local history. Participants will dig into the Name Explorer and consider how creative uses of civic data and research can be used for learning and commemoration.

Join nonprofits JustFix and University Neighborhood Housing Program (UNHP) for a virtual presentation on how they used open data and open-source community tools to build a dashboard that supports tenant organizing in buildings impacted by the collapse of Signature Bank.

Signature Bank financed some of the city’s worst slumlords for years, underwriting their unscrupulous business practices premised on neglect, displacement, and deregulation of rent-stabilized apartments. The bank collapsed in 2023 and the FDIC took over the mortgages for 2,000+ buildings with over 30,000 units of rent-stabilized housing. This changed the incentives to make it possible to hold landlords accountable and allow tenants to use their power in new ways to get meaningful repairs made and even take control of their buildings through collective ownership models.

Ana Peña (Community Research & Data Analyst at UNHP) and Maxwell Austensen (Software Engineer at JustFix) will share the background on Signature Bank and opportunities presented in the wake of its collapse, how they worked with various stakeholders to guide the project, how they used open data and open-source tools to create the data dashboard, and how tenants, organizers, and other groups are utilizing the dashboard to build power and improve housing conditions.

This presentation is open to all, requires no specialized knowledge or skills, and might be most relevant to:
– NYC tenants interested in the situation with Signature Bank and how data can support organizing
– Government agency workers interested in seeing how their open data can be used for good.
– Civic tech enthusiasts interested in ways to access and utilize open data in new ways.