Session 12 From Data to Places (Part 2)
Session Description
On Tuesday, you spent time walking and observing portions of the West Urbana neighborhood. Now that you have a shared frame of reference, you will work collectively with your group members to think about how to tell a story of the neighborhood. The challenge of this exercise is to think about how to systematically describe a neighborhood after your observations of a part of it, and to think about how to leverage and organize information to focus your description.
Session Goals
- Collaboratively build a story about the West Urbana neighborhood that leverages both your direct observation and existing indicators.
- Reflect upon the tactical and design choices you have made in telling your story.
Before Class
Review your notes and observational materials from your neighborhood field visit.
During Class
Work collaboratively with your group members to develop a short memorandum describing the West Urbana neighborhood. Your memo should draw off of your field observations, but should also include demographic summaries coming from census data or other sources of secondary data (please start with the same selected census indicators we have worked with for the past few weeks).
Your report should describe the following:
- Neighborhood character, identity, and assets - integrating both primary and secondary data, describe the character, identity, and assets of the neighborhood, addressing (at a minimum) your areas of focus.
- Infrastructure and Environment
- Economy and Housing
- Health and Wellbeing
- Sense of Place
- Information Gaps - based upon your description above, what information gaps exist? What types of information would you like to have to better convey what you observed on the ground in the West Urbana neighborhood?
- Proposed Strategy for Systematic Examination - based upon your assessment of information gaps, how do you propose collecting that information, and how would you integrate it into your report?
- Reflection - as a group, reflect upon some of the challenges you faced in systematically observing elements of the neighborhood, linking those observations with existing data or information, and conveying that story in a memorandum.
After Class
- Please submit one memorandum as an R notebook and associated files.
- Please add to your initial reflection on what you knew about the neighborhood before you visited your thoughts on what you know now and what you experienced in attempting to systematically observe the neighborhood and communicate its qualities. Combine these materials into a single notebook file and push these to the appropriate folder in your group’s GitHub repository.