New York City has an incredible amount of data available on their website for the public to explore. They have annual summary reports, as well as interactive tools where one can select variables they are interested in seeing. The instantly available data is already crunched, but one can request “raw” data with an online request form. According to the instructions, it can take anywhere from two to four weeks for the files to be sent to you.

For the dataset project, I am interested in exploring the teen pregnancy rates in the five boroughs. I will start playing with the data and see what correlations stand out to me when I visualize them using various visualization tools. Perhaps I will notice something beyond the correlation between economic status and unplanned pregnancy and discover something new for me. On Wednesday, I went to the Digital Fellows office hours and talked to Patrick Smyth, Hannah Aizenman, and Stephen Zweibel about my options. They suggested I start with Excel pivot tables and then move on to Gapminder and Tableau to see what I can do there.

Special shout-out to Davide for his post on the Data Visualization workshop 🙂